Several other little boys and girls were to come to our house and go with us. We had long been in the habit of going to the meadows to fish and play, where we had the merriest and happiest of times. Sometimes, though the meadows were only half a mile from us, we took a slice or two of bread-and-butter in a little basket, to serve for dinner, so that we could stay all day; for the meadows and ditches extended several miles below the city, and we wandered and played all the way down to the Point House. On these trips we caught sun-fish, roach, cat-fish, and sometimes perch, and always brought them home. We generally got prodigiously hungry from the exercise we took, and sat down on the thick grass under a tree to eat our scanty dinners. These dinner-times came very early in the day; and long before it was time to go home in the afternoon, we became even more hungry than we had been in the morning,--but our baskets had been emptied. I think these young days, with these innocent sports and recreations, were among the happiest of my life. I do not think the fish we caught were of much account, though father was always glad to see them; and I remember how he took each one of our baskets, as we came into the kitchen, looked into it, and turned over and counted the fishes it contained. My brother Fred generally had the most, and I had the fewest: but it seems that even for other things than fishes I never had a taking way about me. Father was very fond of them, for mother had a way of frying their little thin bodies into a nice brown crisp, which made us all a good breakfast. So father had made us lines, with corks and hooks, tied them to nice little poles, and showed us how to use them and keep them in order, and had a corner in the shed in which he taught us to set them up out of harm's way. Occasionally he even went with us to the meadows himself.