enough tumbles to make it exciting, and a very substantial reward if judgment were used in the picking. The supply so laid in often lasted past Christmas, and we had little else. Walnuts were too dear. Chestnuts we did not know at all, not the eatable kind. The other, the horse-chestnut, made fine ammunition when, in autumn, we played “robber and soldier.” The winter storms that drove in wreckage from the Gulf Stream strewed our coast, indeed, with Brazil-nuts, sometimes whole ship loads of them, but they were good only for making bonfires. The sea or something else had cracked them. There was not a kernel in one of them. It does not seem to me that life could be worth much in the Latin School without those nutting expeditions. And so, when I went there with my own boys, and after wading through the old bog where the stork stalked up and down fishing for frogs, we came to the cool shade of the forest and found it hedged in with cheeky American barbed wire and signs up warning intruders off, my spirit rose in instant rebellion. This was a double disgrace not to be borne. And once back again in the land of freedom I planned to defeat that wretched barbed-wire fence. Not only must it go, but the forest itself must belong to the Latin School, or else the undisputed right to go nutting there forever; and while I had it in mind I thought I saw a way to drive in the edge of democracy by vesting the control of it in the boys, with the proviso that at least once a year they should invite the public school boys to be their guests there. In my day they fought at the drop of a hat; the recollection of the bitter feud between them stirs my blood even now when I think of it. But alas for the best-laid plans of mice and men! I was told, when I moved to the attack, that times had changed; that school was dismissed at two o’clock, not at five, nowadays, and that therefore month’s leave as we knew it had gone out of existence; that Latin School and “plebs” were part of the same system, hence the strife of the old times had ceased; and that anyhow boys rode cycles and made century runs and such things, where we went nutting. Truly, the times do change. I am glad I was a boy then, if I am a back number now. [Illustration: PICKING RÄVLINGER IN THE MOOR.]