While these words are slowly chanted, the other children scatter and hide. The moment “_It_” pronounces the final “wack”, the chase begins. Never were such wonderful houses for hiding as those in Louisburg Square and Mount Vernon Street. The Thayer, Sears, Hemenway, Warren, Paine, and Gray houses have fine vestibules, with outer doors hospitably ajar, or at least unlocked. Their owners are ranked as public benefactors. It is a matter of honor that their hospitality must never be abused, and no crumb of bread or scrap of orange peel be allowed to drop on their immaculate steps. One child in one hiding place is the rule of the game, and the competition is keen for certain favorite “hidey holes.” Up and down the steep streets, we tore and ramped, in all weathers, gathering Miss Julia’s roses. On zero days, when the sidewalks were sheets of glare ice, sliding in a row, with hands on each other’s shoulders, took the place of all other games. When spring came, and the melancholy black trees in Louisburg Square broke out of bounds and waved their slender branches in the world-ecstasy of the new birth, skipping ropes appeared, as if by magic, governed by the same occult law that on a certain day produces marbles among men children. With April, when the streets were finally clear of ice and snow, mysterious hieroglyphics in white chalk were sketched upon the sidewalks, and hop-scotch became the only sport worthy of the name. I am often asked in these days to subscribe money for a playground, attendant guardians and new-fangled apparatus for play. At such times I am glad that I was young when I was! No playground could ever make up for the splendid freedom of those old Boston streets, where the children of my time were turned loose to amuse themselves. When the old games, played by the girls of Athens and Rome, grew stale, we invented new games of our own. Certain bolder spirits formed a secret society, called “the Rovers of Boston.” Dinner, at this time, was commonly eaten at two or half-past two o’clock, though some “fashionable” families dined at three. After dinner the Rovers met at the Joy Street entrance of the Common, to plan the afternoon adventures. At the time I am now speaking of, we were living in Boston in one of the various houses my father either rented or owned. The elder children were growing up and, for their sakes, he reluctantly closed the Green Peace home and moved into the city, which my mother greatly preferred. We enjoyed for several seasons the Sargent house, Number 13 Chestnut Street, for many years the home of the Radical Club. As founder and leader of the Rovers, I had a sense of responsibility for the afternoon’s fun. Life has brought me few sensations more thrilling than the peculiar musical sound that, on certain cold winter mornings, roused me from sleep. Metallic, muffled, rhythmic, all-pervading, a solo under my window, and a distant chorus thundering from every street and alley on Beacon Hill. “The Snow Shovels!”