All our school-books were extravagantly illustrated with drawings of every kind of sailing-vessel, and every boy owned some sort of craft whittled from a block of wood and trimmed with infinite pains,—­sloops, schooners, brigs, and full-rigged ships, with their sails and string ropes properly adjusted and named for us by some old sailor.  These precious toy craft with lead keels we learned to sail on a pond near the town.  With the sails set at the proper angle to the wind, they made fast straight voyages across the pond to boys on the other side, who readjusted the sails and started them back on the return voyages.  Oftentimes fleets of half a dozen or more were started together in exciting races.

Our most exciting sport, however, was playing with gunpowder.  We made guns out of gas-pipe, mounted them on sticks of any shape, clubbed our pennies together for powder, gleaned pieces of lead here and there and cut them into slugs, and, while one aimed, another applied a match to the touch-hole.  With these awful weapons we wandered along the beach and fired at the gulls and solan-geese as they passed us.  Fortunately we never hurt any of them that we knew of.  We also dug holes in the ground, put in a handful or two of powder, tamped it well around a fuse made of a wheat-stalk, and, reaching cautiously forward, touched a match to the straw.  This we called making earthquakes.  Oftentimes we went home with singed hair and faces well peppered with powder-grains that could not be washed out.  Then, of course, came a correspondingly severe punishment from both father and teacher.

Another favorite sport was climbing trees and scaling garden-walls.  Boys eight or ten years of age could get over almost any wall by standing on each other’s shoulders, thus making living ladders.  To make walls secure against marauders, many of them were finished on top with broken bottles imbedded in lime, leaving the cutting edges sticking up; but with bunches of grass and weeds we could sit or stand in comfort on top of the jaggedest of them.

Like squirrels that begin to eat nuts before they are ripe, we began to eat apples about as soon as they were formed, causing, of course, desperate gastric disturbances to be cured by castor oil.  Serious were the risks we ran in climbing and squeezing through hedges, and, of course, among the country folk we were far from welcome.  Farmers passing us on the roads often shouted by way of greeting:  “Oh, you vagabonds!  Back to the toon wi’ ye.  Gang back where ye belang.  You’re up to mischief, Ise warrant.  I can see it.  The gamekeeper’ll catch ye, and maist like ye’ll a’ be hanged some day.”