The Bacchic procession dropped its members here and there along the road and we got to our own cottage tired, sunburnt and hungry. We ate our suppers of berries and milk out of pewter porringers with pewter spoons and went to bed at dark. The next day we fed on berry pies, and all the neighborhood during the berry season bore the marks of pies in blackened teeth and lips, except a few fastidious young women who cleaned theirs with vinegar. Tooth brushes were as unknown as rouge and powder. Every Saturday night the children were scrubbed in a wash tub in front of the fire place in winter, and at the door in summer. During the session of school my mother washed my ears and face every day, pinned my collar, kissed me, and always her tedious parting injunction was, mind your teacher, study your lesson and be a good boy. Then away with flying feet I overtake my companions, whom no sooner met, than we loitered along the road, hand in hand, or arms around another's neck, merry and playful, quite unmindful of nine o'clock and the hateful lesson. There were no precocious and wonderful children in our red school house. Even I did not begin to write poetry until I was eighteen or nineteen! The only literary prodigy among our neighbors was a maiden lady who wrote obituary verses on the death of her pious friends. The berry season lasted several weeks, and toward its close prudent housewives dried some for winter use or preserved them in molasses. The last we gathered were the swamp, or high-bush blueberries. These had a sub-acid, delicious flavor, not unlike the smell of the swamp pink, which grew in the same spot. The black raspberry, which we called thimble berry, was found along the stone walls, but was not abundant. I knew a few bushes and kept it secret, for if I found a saucerful I was sure of a small pie baked by my mother, and all my own. If I could not find enough for a pie I strung such as I gathered on long spears of grass. As they were shaped like little thimbles, I fitted them on the grass stems one over the other like a nest of cups, reversing them at intervals, to make a pattern, which showed the young savage, generally intent only on something to eat or to play with, to have a slight artistic instinct. As I now recall those strings of thimble berries, I think they would make an humble ornamental border to a picture of a New England roadside with its crooked and tumbled stone walls. No road to me is attractive that is not bounded by such walls and fringed with berry bushes, brush and wild apple trees, from among which peer forth the cymes of the wayfaring bush and sweet scented clusters of the traveller's joy. Let England have her trim, hawthorne lanes and pleached gardens of fruit and flower, and Italy her olive and orange; for me the New England wilding roadside, interrupted only now and then by a farmhouse and littered yard, is dearer.