For children, berrying was play, pure pastime; it brought no money to their pockets. For the first hour it was infinitely exciting; by the next, we wanted something else, and it was difficult to keep us in order. What to do next is an eternal question that has followed both children and man from Eden. It is usually resolved by doing the same thing over again. A little boy once sat discontentedly on the bank of a river. A traveller asked him what was the matter. He answered "I want to be on the other side of the stream." "What for?" inquired the traveller. "So that I could come back here," said the restless boy. To hide and play games was one means of escape from the fatigue of the slow filling berry pails. Then such quiet fell over the pasture that our elders knew some mischief was afoot. We were promptly discovered, scolded and warned that we must fill our pails before we could play. As milking time approached we gathered up stray hats, aprons and handkerchiefs and prepared to go home. We painted each others' cheeks with the red blood of huckleberries and crowned our heads with leaves of the birch and oak, stalks of indigo weed or broad fern fronds that hung down over the face like green veils. Thus freaked and marked, walking in single file, our mothers and elder sisters behind us, shouting, leaping and laughing, we presented something as near a Bacchic procession as could be found in a community enshrouded in the black cloak of John Calvin. What a good time it was to be alive, and never is a boy so young as in the berry pasture, nor any place so full of enchantments. She--for it was never a boy--who had picked the most berries that day, headed the band and was a proud and envied person. Our elders cherished this emulation. I was always thinking that the next time we went berrying, I should try for the head of the procession; but the fun was too much for me; I could not hold to my resolution above a half hour; I was excessively fond of praise but averse to the ways of meriting it. The only long word I brought away from childhood was approbativeness. I never used the word, nor knew its meaning, and, least of all, could have pronounced it. I heard it once only, together with another word, editor, which I understood as little, from the lips of a travelling phrenologist. It happened that my mother lodged and fed him for a night and he paid his score by examining the heads of all the family. I was greatly impressed when he remarked that I had a large bump of approbativeness and would sometime be an editor. As to the bump, feeling over my own head, I never could find it. My mother said it was inside and that the phrenologist meant I must be a good boy. I was quite used to that interpretation of everything concerning myself. A great many years after, when I became editor of an obscure newspaper, so little comfort, reputation or profit did I find in it, that I amused myself in thinking of it as the fulfillment of the phrenologist's prophecy.