250 MISCELLANEOUS. 



ally one of us would get knocked down when it happened to 

 come in hot and hit us on the head. I have frequently worn 

 black spots on various parts of my body for two or three 

 weeks that I got in this way. But fear of getting hit devel- 

 oped great elasticity in our joints, and we became very 

 " artful dodgers. " 



We frequently had some terrific snowball combats when 

 the snow became wet and heavy. When we commenced 

 snowballing we meant business, and frequently got badly hurt 

 in this way, too. I remember a remarkable shot I made with 

 a snowball on one occasion. We had chosen sides, 'taken 

 our ground, and deployed as skirmishers. After the fight had 

 grown warm, I made a ball very hard, and threw it at one of 

 the other boys. He was just making a large one, and was 

 packing it very hard. He had it about completed when mine 

 arrived, struck his squarely, as he was pressing it between his 

 hands, and knocked it all into " pi." 



Such were some of our boyish sports. We never stopped 

 to think of the danger we incurred, but only went in for fun, 

 and we usually had it. 



From the schoolhouse site, I stroll across the old field 

 adjoining, and which in fact now includes it. Even here I 

 stop and ponder. I have plowed and hoed the corn, raked 

 and bound the golden wheat and oats here, when there were 

 perhaps fifty large stumps on each acre of the ground. Now 

 there is not one. They, like many other of the old land- 

 marks, have succumbed to the inevitable they have decayed 

 and disappeared, and the field now looks like a natural 

 prairie. ^But here, at the lower end of the field, are at 

 last some objects that are just as they were when I last saw 

 them. They are those great ledges of solid limestone, that 

 crop out of the hillsides and tower perpendicularly to heights 

 of twenty, thirty, and even fifty feet. No, they have not 



