sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or
register, or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She
withdrew them with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a
blister as big as the tip itself. We had no glorious out-door
playground in West Newton; it was a matter of back yards and sullen
streets. The snow kept piling up, week after week; but there was no
opportunity to put it to its proper use of coasting. The only
redeeming feature of the physical situation that I recall is the
momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots. They were very
uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron from
over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is
bigger than most men.

But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
common-school education. They had three children, of about our age,
all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly,
and was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George
Combe, the phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he
was himself so ardent a believer in the new science that when his
younger son, Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very
early age he declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that
he was not worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo
strange transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute