“The twentieth of November, then, it is,” answered my aunt. “You will be thirteen, _thirteen_, next twentieth of November, mind you. You are _twelve, going on thirteen_! Don’t forget that for a minute; if you do, it might get us all in jail for per-_jury_! Now, suppose that a man meets you on the streets to-morrow and asks you what your age is, what will you tell him?” “I’m thirteen, going on----no, I mean twelve, going on thirteen, and will be thirteen the twentieth of November!” “Say it half a dozen times to get it fixed in your mind,” said aunt, and I rehearsed it intermittently till bedtime, so that I had it indelibly fixed in my mind that, henceforth, I must go into the world and swear to a lie, abetted by my foster parents, all because I wanted to go into the mill and because my foster parents wanted me in the mill. Thus ended the night when I dropped nearly two years bodily out of my life, a most novel experience indeed and one that surely appeals to the imagination if not to the sympathy. The following week, a few days before I was sent to the public-school, we removed to a part of the city where there were not so many mill tenements, into the first floor of a double tenement. There were only two of these houses in the same yard with a grass space between them facing the highway. In this space, during the early fall, the landlord dumped two bushels of apples every Monday morning at half-past eight. It was definitely understood that only the children of the tenants should be entitled to gather the fruit. No one was allowed to be out of the house until the landlord himself gave the signal that all was ready, so we could be found, peering from the back and front doors, a quick-eyed, competitive set of youngsters, armed with pillow-slips and baskets, leaping out at the signal, falling on the heap of apples, elbowing one another until every apple was picked, when the parents would run out, settle whatever fights had started up, note with jealous eyes how much of the fruit their respective representatives had secured, all the while the amused landlord stood near his carriage shouting, “Your Harry did unusually well to-day, Mrs. Burns. He beat them all. What a pillow-slipful he got, to be sure!”