Amusements in Childhood. 3 



he has always, as far back as his memory serves, been 

 troubled with dreams, and those seldom of a pleasant 

 character, but often attended with a very disagreeable 

 sensation as if of nightmare. Sometimes a frightful 

 sound would seem to attend a terrifying incident in 

 these visions of the night, startling his ears as though 

 a railway train had rushed close by or through them. 

 This always wakened him up in a tremor, with his 

 ears ringing loudly ; and though within the last few 

 years these noises in the head have almost left him, 

 the dreaming nightly never has. 



In his early days children were not put to school so 

 soon as they are now, so that in the leisure of his 

 childhood he would have had time to display a 

 precocious love of natural history, had it occurred to 

 him to do so. But, looking back over seventy-eight 

 or eighty years, he does not recall anything that would 

 especially indicate or augur a partiality on his part 

 for the study of animals, great or small. 



In common with most boys that have the chance, 

 he was fond of chasing butterflies, catching minnows 

 with a crooked pin on the end of a thread, hunting 

 for birds' nests, and harrying bees'-bykes (the homes 

 of the wild bees). Like many other lads of his own 

 age, he had a great desire to bring up some of the 

 young birds that were captured, though the fostering 

 was more often a failure than a success. One of the 

 amusements in which he took part was trapping birds 

 in snow time by a noose of horsehair or by getting 

 them enticed under a riddle that is to say, a wire 

 sieve with coarse meshes. In his own home, catch- 

 ing mice alive under a quart basin with a bit of cheese 



