With all due respect to ninety-nine per cent. of that specific sect who are emphatically all that the Forges were not, the latter were Methodists. They were more. The village had it they were “shouting Methodists.” I knew well enough what a regular Methodist was. My own father and mother were Methodists. But a “shoutin’ Methodist” was a novelty and a mystery. I flew wildly from the Forge shop one Saturday morning when, after watching Johnathan at work on a pair of child’s shoes for a time, I summoned the nerve to ask: “Say, Mr. Forge, tell me sumpin’, will you? I’m a brother Methodist and all like that, you know, but not a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’, like all the village calls you, and, well, I’d like to know what a ‘shoutin’ Methodist’ is. Would you mind shoutin’ for me a coupla times so’s I can see how you do it—and why?” Johnathan not only shouted for me but he threw something at me for good measure. I believe it was the nearest old shoe. Both of which had nothing to do with religion. I stopped running only when I had crossed the lower village. I hid the balance of that forenoon under Artemus Wright’s blacksmith shop, lamenting that probably I would never be allowed to play with my chum again. It was in 1897 that the Forges bought the Brown place. Rumors of war filled the land. If war came, my father was going. My mother cried a lot about it. III The girlish young teacher gave Nat and me opposite aisle seats in school that autumn morning, though quickly Nathan went above me. His grandmother had taught him to read; he was already familiar with Æsop’s “Fables” and Grimm’s “Fairy Tales.” Late that afternoon, Nat and I walked home together,—down the hill, through East Foxboro village, past the Methodist and Baptist churches, off on the Center road toward Brown’s hill. The distance was only a mile, yet it took us three hours. Scuffing up the dust, stopping to throw stones at trees or skipping them across the surface of the Causeway—the great sheet of water reaching on both sides of the road just before we started to climb Brown’s hill—day after day during that autumn we covered that distance together. The Causeway does not look so “great” now. Nathan and I drove over there the other day. The place was only a depressing mud flat, rank with stagnant water, grotesque stumps and tall rushes, where town loafers were trying to hook discouraged hornpout. But to make slow progress homeward—to our “chores” perhaps, but also to fathers and mothers and faces and scenes which come now only in dreams, scaring out chipmunks, sighting an occasional sand rabbit or woodchuck, sensing the country air sensuous with ripened blackberry, goldenrod, milkweed, or the roadside pines in Hadley’s pasture—for that privilege again, dear God, Nathan and I would give of our lives many years!