John liked to read these verses, which always made a new and fresh impression with each lock of hair, and he was not critical; they were for him vehicles of true sentiment, and indeed they were what he used when he inclosed a clip of his own sandy hair to a friend.  And it did not occur to him until he was a great deal older and less innocent, to smile at them.  John felt that he would sacredly keep every lock of hair intrusted to him, though death should come on the wings of cholera and take away every one of these sad, red-ink correspondents.  When John’s big brother one day caught sight of these treasures, and brutally told him that he “had hair enough to stuff a horse-collar,” John was so outraged and shocked, as he should have been, at this rude invasion of his heart, this coarse suggestion, this profanation of his most delicate feeling, that he was kept from crying only by the resolution to “lick” his brother as soon as ever he got big enough.

VIII

THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING

One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts, hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them, and the colored leaves have strewn the ground.  On a bright October day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite so exhilarating as going nutting.  Nor is the pleasure of it altogether destroyed for the boy by the consideration that he is making himself useful in obtaining supplies for the winter household.  The getting-in of potatoes and corn is a different thing; that is the prose, but nutting is the poetry, of farm life.  I am not sure but the boy would find it very irksome, though, if he were obliged to work at nut-gathering in order to procure food for the family.  He is willing to make himself useful in his own way.  The Italian boy, who works day after day at a huge pile of pine-cones, pounding and cracking them and taking out the long seeds, which are sold and eaten as we eat nuts (and which are almost as good as pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the Italians), probably does not see the fun of nutting.  Indeed, if the farmer-boy here were set at pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening the prickly chestnut-burs as a task, he would think himself an ill-used boy.  What a hardship the prickles in his fingers would be!  But now he digs them out with his jack-knife, and enjoys the process, on the whole.  The boy is willing to do any amount of work if it is called play.

In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble and industrious than the boy.  I like to see a crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove; they leave a desert behind them like the seventeen-year locusts.  To climb a tree and shake it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit, and pass to the next, is the sport of a brief time.  I have seen a legion of boys scamper over our grass-plot under the chestnut-trees, each one