All the little figures flitting through those tranquil early dramas are
so sharply drawn, so brightly colored still! I meet Melissa Crane
sometimes nowadays, a prosperous matron with space enough on her broad
back for the very largest plaid ever woven; but her present identity is
hazy and unreal. I see instead, with a sudden throb of memory, the
little Melissa, who, one recess, accepted a sugared doughnut from me,
and said, with a quaint imitation of old folks' manner,--

"I think your mother will be a real good cook, if she lives!"

I hear of Susie Marden, who went out West, married, and grew up with
the country in great magnificence; but to me she is and ever will be
the little girl who made seventy pies, one Thanksgiving time, thereby
earning the somewhat stinted admiration of those among us who could not
cook. Many a great deed, tacitly promised in that springtime, never
came to pass; many a brilliant career ingloriously ended. There was Sam
Marshall. He could do sums to the admiration of class and teacher, and,
Cuvier-like, evolve an entire flock from Colburn's two geese and a
half. His memory was prodigious. He could name the Presidents, bound
the States and Territories, and rattle off the list of prepositions so
fast that you could almost see the spark-shower from his rushing wheels
of thought. It was an understood thing among us, when Sam was in his
teens, that he should at least enter the Senate; perhaps he would even
be President, and scatter offices, like halfpence, among his scampering
townsmen. But to-day he patiently does his haying--by hand! and "goes
sleddin'" in the winter. The Senate is as far from him as the Polar
Star, and I question whether he could even bear the crucial test of two
geese and a half. Yet I still look upon him with a thrill of awe, as
the man selected by the popular vote to represent us in fame's
Valhalla, and mysteriously defeated by some unexpected move of the