Soon, like an arrow from the bow, I shoot across the “Town Brook” bridge, and, jumping out beyond, skip the sinking ground, and with an anxious eye and careful poise I “trim the ship,” and, hoping, leave the rest to fate. Perhaps I land on both runners, perhaps I don’t; that depends. I’ve tried both ways I know, and if I remember rightly, I always found it royal jolly fun; for what cared I at a bruise, or a pint of snow down my back, when I got it there myself? The average New England boy is hard to kill, and I was one of that kind. Any boy who could brave the hidden mysteries and capricious favoritism of those fifteen dislocating “thank you, marms,” and _hang together_ through it all, and, having so done, finish that experience with a plunging double somersault into a crusted snow-bank, or, perchance, into a stone wall--if he can do this, I say, and survive the fun, then there is no reason why he should not live to tell of it in old age, for never in the flesh will he go through a rougher ordeal. I’ve known a boy who “_hated_ the old district school because the hard benches hurt him so,” and who would rest his aching limbs for hours together in this gentle sort of exercise. “The fine print made his eyes ache, and he couldn’t study;” and yet when one day he comes home with one eye all colors of the rainbow, “it’s _nothing_.” “Consistency is a jewel.” Boys don’t generally wear jewels. But they are all alike. Boys will be boys, and if they only live through it, they will some day look back and wonder at their good fortune. At the foot of that long hill the “Town Brook” gurgles on its winding way, and passing beneath the weather-beaten bridge, it makes a sudden turn, and spreads into a glassy pond behind the bulwarks of the saw-mill dam. In summer, were we as near as this, we would hear the intermittent ring of the whizzing saw, the clanking cogs, and the tuneful sounds of the falling bark-bound slabs; but now, like its bare willows that were wont to wave their leafy boughs with caressing touch upon the mossy roof, the old mill shows no sign of life. Its pulse is frozen, and the silent wheel is resting from its labors beneath a coverlet of snow. Who is there who has not in some recess of the memory a dear old haunt like this, some such sleeping pond radiant with reflections of the scenes of early life? Thither in those winter days we came, our numbers swelled from right and left with eager volunteers for the game, till at last, almost a hundred strong, we rally on the smooth black ice. [Illustration: SNOW-FLAKES OF MEMORY.]