MEMORIES OF YOUTH. 287 



reared in the country does not) when I was a boy, how I 

 went out in the sunny days of autumn, after the frosts had 

 painted the hillsides, to gather chestnuts ; and when the 

 breeze rustled among the branches, how the nuts came 

 rattling down ; and how if the winds were still, I climbed 

 into the trees and shook their tops, and how the chestnuts 

 pattered to the ground like a shower of hail. I remember 

 the squirrels how they chattered, and chased each other up 

 and down the trees, or leaped from branch to branch, 

 gathering here and there a nut, and scudding away to their 

 store houses in the hollow trees, providing in this season of 

 plenty for the barrenness of the winter months. I remem- 

 ber, too, how we gathered, in those same old autumnal days, 

 hickory-nuts and butter-nuts by the bushel ; and how plea- 

 sant it was in the long cold winter evenings, to sit around 

 the great old kitchen fire-place, cracking the nuts we had 

 gathered when the green, the yellow, the crimson, the brown, 

 the grey, and the pale leaves were on the trees. Pleasant 

 evenings those seem to me now, as they come floating down 

 on the current of memory from the long past, and dear are 

 the faces of those that made up the tableaux as they were 

 grouped around those winter fires. Logs were blazing on 

 the great hearth, and the pineknots, thrown at intervals on 

 the fire, gave a bold and cheerful light throughout that 

 capacious kitchen. I remember how the wfnter wind went 

 glancing over the house-top, whirling, and eddying, and 

 moaning around the corners, hissing under the door and 

 sending its cold breath in at every crevice ; and how the 



