From the live-for-ever, or orpine (once tenderly cherished as a garden favorite, now in many localities a hated and persistent weed), we made frogs, or purses, by gently pinching the fleshy leaves between thumb and forefinger, thus loosening the epidermis on the lower side of the leaf and making a bladder which, when blown up, would burst with a delightful pop. The New England folk-names by which this plant is called, such as frog-plant, blow-leaf, pudding-bag plant, show the wide-spread prevalence of this custom. A rival in sound could be made by popping the foxglove's fingers. English countrywomen call the foxglove a pop. The morning-glory could also be blown up and popped, and the canterbury-bell. We placed rose petals and certain tender leaves over our lips, and drew in the centres for explosion. [Illustration: Spanish Dolls] Noisy boys found scores of other ways to make various resounding notes in the gardens. A louder pop could be made by placing broad leaves on the extended thumb and forefinger of one hand and striking them with the other. The boys also made squawks out of birch bark and fiddles of cornstalks and trombones from the striped prickly leaf-stalks of pumpkins and squashes. The New England chronicler in rhyme of boyhood days, Rev. John Pierpont, called this sound evoked from the last-named instrument "the deeper tone that murmurs from the pumpkin leaf trombone." It is, instead, a harsh trumpeting. These trombones were made in Germany as early as the thirteenth century. An ear-piercing whistle could be constructed from a willow branch, and a particularly disagreeable sound could be evoked by every boy, and (I must acknowledge it) by every girl, too, by placing broad leaves of grass--preferably the pretty striped ribbon-grass, or gardener's garters--between the thumbs and blowing thereon. Other skilful and girl-envied accomplishments of the boys I will simply name: making baskets and brooches by cutting or filing the furrowed butternut or the stone of a peach; also fairy baskets, Japanesque in workmanship, of cherry stones; manufacturing old-women dolls of hickory nuts; squirt-guns and pop-guns of elderberry stems; pipes of horse-chestnuts, corn-cobs, or acorns, in which dried sweet-fern could be smoked; sweet-fern or grape-stem or corn-silk cigars.