IMPRESSIONS I Looking back on those days in Foxboro Center now, Nathan and I think of them as Nuggets of Time from the Golden Mine of Boyhood, unalloyed. I would like to transcribe whole pages from the Memory Book, all of which has contributed to the great mass of experience influencing the most vital parts of our lives. Yet the subject matter is too trivial and the type too fine to ask a busy world to read. There are no woods now like those Nathan and I explored in those days. There are no valleys so peaceful, no afternoons so long, no twilights so soft, no stars so high. Thrushes and peewees sang in the leafy silences of those woodlands. Cloistered glades would be suddenly desecrated by the shrill screeches of jays. Brooks babbled unexpectedly across marshy pathways, to be forded on mossy stones. Jack-in-the-Pulpits and Lady’s Slippers grew among the smooth brown needles of hemlock-roofed hillsides. Occasionally, when lying in the forest quiet, we would hear the tread of a lone partridge on last autumn’s brittle leaves as sharp and loud as the tread of a man. But alas and alack! Nathan’s little sister often “tagged after us,” demanding petulantly to be helped over stone walls, around bramble patches and across ditches, getting her feet wet in bogs and squealing hideously if we traveled too fast or gave the slightest indication of abandoning her to forest terrors. There is only one thing more tragic to a small boy than having a little sister to bother him. That is having an elder sister to “boss” him. There were rainy days, too, when we explored old attics, playing among heirlooms and relics that to-day would be worth much money. There were days when we invented weird pastimes in the fantastic nooks, crannies and haylofts of two fragrant country barns. Sometimes in the spring, when the winter is breaking up and the soil is coming through in patches, sweet and wet, I catch a breath of fragrance from those Foxboro play-times. I smell again the clear, cool, pungent dampness of woodland ravines where we poked noisy leaves aside to find the first mayflowers. The odor of summer pastures in the sunset comes to me and the sweet scent of ripening huckleberries, briarbloom and fern. Autumn brings its scents and odors, too—crimson sumach and bursting milkweed; the acrid sweetness of loaded apple trees with windfallen fruit knobbing the ground beneath; old goldenrod; the sharp nip of frost-bitten air blowing fitfully across the hills on afternoons when the earth shivered in the nakedness of fall and the sky was a museum of cloud. Then winter came with gray days—soft-muffled, snow-heavy—moist mornings, dripping noons, melancholy twilights when even the carmine of the sinking sun was freezing cold; then the piercing stab of blue crystal nights when the stars were very high and the panes of windows in empty rooms were weirdly padded with frost.