From it, from solder melted off tin cans, and from now and then a haul of babbitt found in wornout windmills, we minted dollars. We melted our metal in a large iron spoon over an outdoor fire and poured the liquid into a round wooden bluing box, wherein it quickly cooled and solidified. (Bluing for laundry in those days came in powdered form, for dissolving in water--in wooden boxes, with tops that screwed on, about the diameter of a dollar.) This free coinage was limited only by the supply of crude metal. The more canned goods we consumed and the more old bullets we could find, the higher the rate of coinage. The two principal uses the dollars had were for pitching--into holes in the ground--and for buying cattle, horses, sheep, and goats from each other. Each of us had a play ranch enclosed by miniature fences--twine (our barbed wire) strung on sticks stuck into the ground like posts. Our cattle were tips of horns that had been sawed off cattle at the chute in the big picket cowpens about a hundred yards from the house. Our horses were spools from which my mother and neighbors had used the thread in endless sewing; our goats were empty snail shells; our sheep were oak galls. Sheep and goats were very plentiful and, therefore, had a low value; cattle and horses were harder to come by. With running irons made of baling wire and heated red hot in a fire, we branded the cattle, sheep, and horses, but could not brand the snail-shell goats. We made long trains of flat rectangular sardine cans, coupled together by pieces of wire, to haul the stock from ranch to ranch. Our dog, Old Joe--named after Beautiful Joe, the wonderful hero of a favorite book--made a very unsatisfactory engine to pull the freight train. We hitched green lizards, snared with the hair of horsetail, to a single sardine can or to a cardboard matchbox that served as a wagon. Lizards never make tractable teams. This ranching, with all of its ramifications, was not primarily Christmas play. It went on more in the summer than in the winter, but no Christmas toys could compete with it. Certain Christmas books added to prolonged play. We children always knew positively that there would be books on the Christmas tree or in our stockings. We always wanted particular titles, and we had the before-Christmas pleasure of speculating on what known and unknown books Santa Claus might bring. I don’t remember what Christmas it was that _Ivanhoe_ came to make knights of us boys. Old Stray, an irritatingly gentle horse that could hardly be forced out of a walk, enriched the flowering of our knighthood. _Swiss Family Robinson_ made us into cave-dwellers. We dug our own cave into the bank of Long Hollow, some distance below the house.