enough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, because
any other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was always
splitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes,
and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; the
wheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailed
across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles,
and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of a
street to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.
[Illustration: FORAGING.]
When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his
brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He
started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost
still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops
and the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get
there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them
was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and
around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay
scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still
yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to
the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen,
wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped from
the trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against the
blue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallen
fruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send them
plumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, and
the nuts almost leaped into the boys' hands. The boys ran, some of them
to gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beat
them from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick off
his shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut was
still clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of
grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows
of a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, where
the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss them
into a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of
that they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on
their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for
days that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one
another's faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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