strawberries, small but of potent flavor, which the little boy would
gather with earnest diligence, and fetch to the persons he loved,
mashed into premature jam in his small fist; exciting turtles with
variegated carapaces, and heads and feet that went in and out;
occasional newts from the plashy places; and in autumn, hatfuls of
walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose prickly hulls the
preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently plump themselves.
Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also fond of playing
the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say, and the next
moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would hear his
voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the topmost
branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was a big
cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled with
these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and
cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.

The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was
thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an
upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them
for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by
scores; but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped
against my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of
them stung Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence.
Her lip at once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the
conclusion, by some tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence
was at least half to blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully
avoided it. I likewise avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of
giving a hitch to their after-parts as they walk along always struck
me as being obviously diabolical.