embowered in green, radiant with sunshine--each day live-long
with delight.

There was first of all in the spring, when the chorus of returning
song-birds began, the gathering of maple-sap, still sacred to boyhood. The
sheep were to be washed and sheared, too, and the awkward, weak-kneed
calves to be fed. While the spring floods ran high, ducks and geese
covered the water, and muskrats came out, driven from their holes. Then
appeared great flocks of pigeons, well fattened from their winter's
sojourn in the South, and everybody, young and old, gave himself up to
their slaughter; while this lasted, the crack! crack! of guns was heard
all the forenoon long, particularly if the day was cloudy and the birds
were flying low--and ah! the buttered pigeon pies my aunt made, too.

As the floods went down, and the snow-water disappeared, the fishing
began, first with the big, silly suckers, then with wiser and more valued
fish. The woods became dry, and then in long, joyous rambles we set traps
and snares, hunted for nests among the low branches and in the
marsh-grass, smoked woodchucks out of their holes, gathered wild flowers,
winter-green, and dye-plants, or built great fires of the dead leaves and
pithless, scattered branches, as boys to the end of time will delight
to do.

When autumn came, there were mushrooms, and beech-nuts, butter-nuts,
hickory-nuts, wild grapes, pucker-berries, not to speak of loads of
elder-berries for making wine. And the pigeons, flying southward, darkened
the sky once more; and then the horses were unshod for treading out the
wheat, and we children fanned away the chaff with big palm-leaves; and the
combs of honey were gathered and shelved; and the October husking began by
our having the first kettleful of white corn, swollen and hulled by being