By the time I had done whispering to the bark, Delia said she was going to tell her mother. “Such _lies_,” she put it bluntly. “You’ll never write a book, I don’t care what you say. You got to tell the truth to write books.” “Everybody that tells the truth don’t write a book,” I contended--but sobered. I wanted passionately to write a book. What if this business of pretending, which Delia called lies should be in the way of truthful book-writing? But the habit was too strong for me. In that very moment we came upon a huge new ant-hill. “Don’t step on that ant-hill. See all the ants--they say to step over it!” I cried, and pushed Delia round it with some violence. “Well--what makes you always so--_religious_!” she burst out, at the end of her patience. I was still hotly denying this implication when we entered the school yard, and broke into running; for no reason, save that entrances and beginnings always made us want to run and shout. The school yard, quite an ordinary place during school hours, became at the end of school a place no longer to be shunned, but wholly desirable. Next to the wood yard, it was the most mysterious place that we knew. In the school yard were great cords of wood, suitable for hiding; a basement door, occasionally left open, from which at any moment the janitor might appear to drive us away; a band-stand, covered with names and lacking enough boards so that one might climb up without use of the steps; a high-board fence on which one always longed to walk at recess; a high platform from which one had unavailingly pined to jump; outside banisters down which, in school-time, no one might slide, trees which no one might climb, corner brick-work affording excellent steps, which, then, none might scale; broad outside window ledges on which none might sit, loose bricks in the walks ripe for the prying-up, but penalty attended; a pump on whose iron handle the lightest of us might ride save that, in school-time, this was forbidden too. In school-time this yard, so rich in possibilities, was compact of restrictions. None of these things might be done. Once a boy had been expelled for climbing on the schoolhouse roof; and thereupon his father, a painter by trade, had taken the boy to work with him, and when we saw him in overalls wheeling his father’s cart, we were told that _that_ was what came of disobedience, although this boy might, easily no doubt, otherwise have become President of the United States. But after school! Toward supper-time, or in vacation-time, we used to love to linger about the yard and snatch at these forbidden pleasures. That is, the girls loved it. The boys had long ago had them all, and were off across the tracks on new adventures unguessed of us.