MEMORIES OF THE 



and after school, in all our childish plays. A favorite with us, 

 both girls and boys, was what we called ''playhouses," which 

 we built along the sloping and high bank of the sparkling, clear 

 creek, in the shade of the beech and birch trees which overhung 

 the same. Sometimes they were quite elaborate, fitted up in 

 good style, with make-believe dishes, rude seats and furniture, 

 such as we could put up ourselves. 



The material for the playhouses was always convenient from 

 the slab piles and waste boards around the mill, which was 

 within four or five rods of the school-house. Sometimes we 

 united with the girls and made a genuine keep-house playhouse, 

 the builders modestly hinting who was who and what was what, 

 as to the heads of the family in the house or houses, but more 

 frequently there prevailed a mild condition of war between the 

 larger girls and us larger boys — by larger boys I mean such of 

 us as were from eight to twelve years of age. 



One day at the boys' recess, Leander Fox, Buck Wilcox, 

 myself and a Cramer boy destroyed one of these girls' play- 

 houses which was under the big birch tree, a little way from the 

 school-house. We razed it to the very ground and hurled the 

 boards of which it was constructed, and the dishes, furniture 

 and household gods which it contained, down the bank into 

 the rippling waters of Deer Creek. When the girls went out 

 they learned of the outrage, and immediately came in and com- 

 plained to Aunt Lucinda that the boys had torn down and 

 destroyed their pretty house. Of course, this required an inves- 

 tigation, and, after calmly thinking it over. Aunt Lucinda began 

 the same. 



We realized that we had done a sneaking, mean thing, but 

 had conspired together, talked it all over and agreed upon our 

 line of defense — namely, an absolute denial as to the real per- 



io8 



