and I were playing in the big attic chamber and amusing ourselves by
lying across the vinegar keg and pushing it about the room with our
feet. We came to the top of the steep stairway that ended against the
chamber door, a foot or more above the kitchen floor, and I suppose we
thought it would be fun to take the stairway on the keg. At the brink of
that stairway my memory becomes a blank and when I find myself again I
am lying on the bed in the "back-bedroom" and the smell of camphor is
rank in the room. How it fared with Jane I do not recall; the injury was
probably not serious with either of us, but it is easy to imagine how
poor Mother must have been startled when she heard that racket on the
stairs and the chamber door suddenly burst open, spilling two of her
children, mixed up with the vinegar keg, out on the kitchen floor. Jane
was more than two years my senior, and should have known better.

Vivid incidents make a lasting impression. I recall what might have been
a very serious accident had not my usual good luck attended me, when I
was a few years older. One autumn day I was with my older brothers in
the corn lot, where they had gone with the lumber wagon to gather
pumpkins. When they had got their load and were ready to start I planted
myself on the load above the hind axle and let my legs hang down between
the spokes of the big wheel. Luckily one of my brothers saw my perilous
position just as the team was about to move and rescued me in time.
Doubtless my legs would have been broken and maybe very badly crushed in
a moment more. But such good fortune seems to have followed me always.
One winter's morning, as I stooped to put on one of my boots beside the
kitchen stove at the house of a schoolmate with whom I had passed the
night, my face came in close contact with the spout of the boiling tea
kettle. The scalding steam barely missed my eye and blistered my brow a
finger's breadth above it. With one eye gone, I fancy life would have
looked quite different. Another time I was walking along one of the