Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/39

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EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
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are got out, and his sphere is already hooped. What's the use of talking to him? When you spoke of sphere music, he thought only of a thumping on his cask. If he does not know something that nobody else does, that nobody told him, then he's a tell-tale.

February 28, 1860. Passed a very little boy in the street to-day who had on a home-made cap of a woodchuck's skin, which his father or older brother had killed and cured, and his mother or older sister had fashioned into a nice warm cap. I was interested by the sight of it, it suggested so much of family history, adventure with the animal, story told about it, not without exaggeration, the human parents, care of their young these hard times. Johnny had been promised a cap many times, and now the work was completed. A perfect little Idyl, as they say. The cap was large and round, big enough, you would say, for the boy's father, and had some kind of cloth visor stitched to it. The top of the cap was evidently the back of the woodchuck, as it were, expanded in breadth, contracted in length, and it was as fresh and handsome as if the woodchuck wore it himself. The great gray-tipped hairs were all preserved and stood out above the brown ones, only a little more loosely than in life. As if he had put his head into the belly of a woodchuck, having