"What sort of games?" demanded Oliver.

"Ball-play and races; all that sort of thing. There was a game we played
with racquets between goals. Village played against village. The people
would sit on the earthworks and clap and shout when the game pleased
them, and gambled everything they had on their home-town players.

"I suppose," he added, looking around on the green tumuli, "I remember
it like this, because when I lived here I was so full of what was going
on that I had no time for noticing how it looked to me."

"What did go on?" both the children wished immediately to know.

"Something different every time the moon changed. Ice-fishing,
corn-husking. We did everything together; that was what made it so
interesting. The men let us go to the fur traps to carry home the pelts,
and we hung up the birch-bark buckets for our mothers at the
sugar-boiling. Maple sugar, you know. Then we would persuade them to
ladle out a little of the boiling sap into plates that we patted out of
the snow, which could always be found lingering in the hollows, at
sugar-makings. When it was still waxy and warm, we rolled up the cooled
syrup and ate it out of hand.

"In summer whole families would go to the bottom lands paw-paw
gathering. Winter nights there was story-telling in the huts. We had a
kind of corn, very small, that burst out white like a flower when it was
parched..."

"Pop-corn!" cried both the children at once. It seemed strange that