It lay back of that part of the town where our house was, contiguous to a common of abandoned orchard and cow lot, and if it lacked anything of adventurous occasion and delight, we, Forrie and Effie and I, the McGee children, and the little Allinghams, did not know it. There was a sort of convention of childhood that we should never go straight to it by the proper path, but it must always be taken by assault or stealth: over the woodhouse and then along the top of the orchard fence as far as you could manage without falling off, and then tagging the orchard trees; I remember there were times when we felt obliged to climb up every tree in our way and down on the other side, and so to the stump lot where the earliest violets were to be found--how blue it would be with them in April about the fairy ring of some decaying trunk!--and beyond the stump lot, the alder brook and the Stone-pit pond where we caught a pike once, come up from the river to spawn. Up from the brook ranged a wood over the shallow hills, farther and darker than we dared, and along its banks was every variety of pleasantness. There was always something to be done there, springs to be scooped out, rills to be dammed; always something to eat, sassafras root, minnows taken by hand and half cooked on surreptitious fires, red haws and hazelnuts; always some place to be visited with freshness and discovery, dark umbrageous corners to provide that dreaded and delighted panic of the wild. But perhaps the best service the pasture did us was as a theatre for the dramatization of the bourgeoning social instinct. We played at church and school in it, at scalping and Robinson Crusoe and the Three Bears. We went farther and played at High Priests and Oracles and Sacrifice--and what were we at Taylorville to know of such things? If this were to be as full an account of my Art as it is of myself, I should have to stop here and try to have you understand how at this time I was all awash in the fluid stuff of it, buoyed and possessed by unknowledgable splendours, heroisms, tendernesses, a shifty glittering flood. I am always checked in my attempt to render this submerged childhood of mine by the recollection of my mother in the midst of the annoyance which any reference to it always caused her, trying judicially to account for it on the basis of my having read too much, with the lurking conviction at the bottom of all comment that a few more spankings might have effectually counteracted it. But though I read more than the other children, there was never very much to read in Taylorville at any time, and no amount of reading could have put into my mind what I found there--the sustaining fairy wonder of the world.