reserved for himself, since there were no other men about. He also enjoyed chopping wood and this may have been his “daily dozen.” We cut down several large oak trees, cleared out underbrush, and, piling it up against the great stumps, built fires that roared for a time and then smouldered for days.
Sometimes I walked with mamma on the hills back of the house, and when we were tired we would sit down under a tree and she would tell me a story and make me a chaplet of oak leaves, folding and fastening each leaf to the next in a most ingenious way. If our walk took us into the lower lands she made bewitching little baskets from the rushes that grew near the water’s edge. I also found the strange equisitum, that I sometimes called “horse-tail,” and sometimes “stove-pipe,” which latter I preferred, because none of the horses that I knew had disjointable tails, while the little hollow tubes of stem that fitted into each other so well must serve the fairies most excellently for their chimneys.
Several spring mornings as I grew older, I got up at dawn with mamma, went to the early empty kitchen for a drink of milk, and then went out with her for a horseback ride, she in her long broadcloth habit and stiff silk hat, and I, a tiny timid girl, perched on a side-saddle atop a great horse. From the point of view of horsemanship I was not a great success, but the joy of the dawn air, the rising sun, the wild-flowers, the companionship of my mother is mine forever.
It was on one of these morning expeditions when we were comparing notes about our tastes in colors,
