We boys got square, too, with the watchmen. We knew their habit of stowing themselves away in the stage-coach that stood in the market-place when they had cried the hour at ten o’clock, and we caught them napping there one dark night when we were coming home from a party. The stage had doors that locked on the outside. We slammed them shut and ran the conveyance, with them in it wildly gesticulating from the windows, through the main street of the town, amid the cheers of the citizens whom the racket aroused from their slumbers. We were safe enough. The watchmen were not anxious to catch us, maddened as they were by our prank, and they were careful not to report us either. I chuckled at that exploit more than once when, in years long after, I went the rounds of the midnight streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt, as they called New York’s Police Commissioner, to find his patrolmen sleeping soundly on their posts when they should have been catching thieves. Human nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so different, after all, in the old world and in the new. With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end. In that night, if a girl would know her fate, she must go to bed walking backward and throw a shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her pillow, I forget which, perhaps both, and say aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy Kings to show her the man Whose table I must set, Whose bed I must spread, Whose name I must bear, Whose bride I must be. The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to be her husband. There was no escape from it, and consequently she did not try. He was her Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for worse. Let us hope that the Nisse played her no scurvy trick, and that it was for better always. CHAPTER V [Illustration: GETTING READY FOR THE REVIEW.] The stork came in April, with delivery from the vile tyranny of March. Talk of March violets! to us the month meant cod-liver oil. It was our steady dessert all through it. Good for the system, they said. Perhaps it was. I think it encouraged duplicity. The rule was that when we had grown to like it so that we licked the spoon after it, we might quit. You wouldn’t believe how quickly we came to adore it. However, when our need was greatest, the stork came, and with it balmy spring and our freedom. Not necessarily all at once: three times the stork had to have snow in its nest to make things right; but we knew the sunshine was not far away. [Illustration: THE STORK CAME IN APRIL.] One day we heard it on its nest, jabbering out a noisy “How d’do” through its long red bill, and then we children gathered below and sang our song of welcome: [Music: Stork, Storkie long leg Where were you this long while? Saw you King Pharaoh’s lofty stone? Stalk’d you in Nile River meadows?]