“It isn’t fair to blame the trousers or the tailor,” he had said when he had tried them on.  “My legs are so long that the imagination of the tailor is sure to fall short if the cloth don’t.  Next time I’ll have ’em made to measure with a ten-foot pole instead of a yardstick.  If they’re too long I can roll ’em up and let out a link or two when they shrink.  Ever since I was a boy I have been troubled with shrinking pants.”

Abe wore a blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons, the tails of which were so short as to be well above the danger of pressure when he sat down.  His cowhide shoes had been well blackened; the blue yarn of his socks showed above them.  “These darned socks of mine are rather proud and conceited,” he used to say.  “They like to show off.”

He wore a shirt of white, unbleached cotton, a starched collar and black tie.

In speaking of his collar to Samson, he said that he felt like a wild horse in a box stall.

Mentor Graham, the schoolmaster, was there—­a smooth-faced man with a large head, sandy hair and a small mustache, who spoke by note, as it were.  Kelso called him the great articulator and said that he walked in the valley of the shadow of Lindley Murray.  He seemed to keep a watchful eye on his words, as if they were a lot of schoolboys not to be trusted.  They came out with a kind of self-conscious rectitude.

The children’s games had begun and the little house rang with their songs and laughter, while their elders sat by the fire and along the walls talking.  Ann Rutledge and Bim Kelso and Harry Needles and John McNeil played with them.  In one of the dances all joined in singing the verses: 

  I won’t have none o’ yer’ weevily wheat,
    I won’t have none o’ yer barley;
  I won’t have none o’ yer’ weevily wheat,
    To make a cake for Charley.

  Charley is a fine young man,
    Charley is a dandy,
  Charley likes to kiss the girls,
    Whenever it comes handy.

When a victim was caught in the flying scrimmage at the end of a passage in the game of Prisoners, he or she was brought before a blindfolded judge: 

“Heavy, heavy hangs over your head,” said the Constable.

“Fine or superfine?” the judge inquired.

“Fine,” said the Constable, which meant that the victim was a boy.  Then the sentence was pronounced and generally it was this: 

“Go bow to the wittiest, kneel to the prettiest and kiss the one that you love best.”

Harry was the first prisoner.  He went straight to Bim Kelso and bowed and knelt, and when he had risen she turned and ran like a scared deer around the chairs and the crowd of onlookers, some assisting and some checking her flight, before the nimble youth.  Hard pressed, she ran out of the open door, with a merry laugh, and just beyond the steps Harry caught and kissed her, and her cheeks had the color of roses when he led her back.