O begin with, my grandmother kept geese and my grandfather kept bees. The geese lived under the barn and the bees lived in forty wooden hives in the garden. My grandmother was very particular about her poultry; when the young turkeys were hatched each tottering fledgling had to swallow a peppercorn. She picked her geese in May in one end of the cow-stable, which was spread with clean wheat straw for the occasion. My grandmother sat in a straight-backed, splintbottomed kitchen chair with a big brass kettle for the feathers. The light came in through three holes in the wall, used for cleaning the stables, and from a trap-door in front of the manger that was behind my grandmother's chair, and through the cracks between the boards.

It was a picturesque interior, with the waiting geese penned in one end of the stable and my tow-headed brother and myself standing hand in hand in the straw at a safe distance as privileged spectators-I in my very first pair of trousers, and my brother in a gingham frock and a pair of pantalets. Our grandmother, who was not more than fifty, seemed very old to us, because she wore a mob-cap over her front hair, which was false like our other grandmother, who was her mother, and whom we knew to be old. My brother and I had a wholesome fear of the old white gander because he hissed at us in defense of his gray mate, and when my grandmother went into the flock to pick him out as the first victim of the plucking, we clambered over the low rail of the manger and hid in the hay. The rail was worn smooth by the necks of the cows, and the auger-holes, which the ropes from their horns passed through, were worn and enlarged by the tossing of the heads of several generations of cows. We had gone into hiding too soon to see the old gander's head and neck thrust into one of my grandmother's black stockings,

and as soon as she was seated again, with the gander's webbed feet held firmly in her left hand and his neck thrust under her left arm, we peeped out of the hay to see what seemed to be a huge black snake writhing over the manger and hissing, although it was headless. Little Fred began to whimper and, with a courage born of my new trousers with pockets, I boosted him out of the manger, and pushed him back to our original position on the straw.

Before my grandmother had plucked three handfuls of feathers from the breast of the old white gander, there was a great buzzing over the stable. It was the first swarm of my grandfather's bees making for the woods to set up for themselves in a bee-tree. She was on her feet in an instant, and so was the gander, who charged on us in blind headless desperation. We fled in tears through a cloud of feathers and chaff.

My grandmother was always prepared for such an emergency, and as soon as she was out of the stable-door she picked up a milk-pan and a wheel-boy, and began a furious beating that so confused the queen bee that she promptly settled with her restless family on an apple-tree in the orchard. A hive, well washed on the inside with sweetened water, was set on a table-cloth under the tree, and my grandfather, with a veil tied over his head and a pair of gauntlets on his hands, sawed off the limb from a ladder, and gently shook off the young bees upon the cloth at the base of the hive. After supper in the cool of the evening the hive was moved into the bee-house.

The forty hives formed an L in an angle of the garden, and on each hive was a small box for honey, with a stone on top to hold it in place. The dooryard was shaded with locust-trees from whose yellow blossoms, that drugged the air with sweetness, the bees made their best honey, and then they winged their way to the basswood-trees in the woods, and then to

the fields of white clover, and then they sampled all the flowers until they were driven at last to make buckwheat honey. I sometimes wondered if my grandfather's bees were intelligently handled, for we never seemed to sell any honey, and the entire product of forty hives was a good deal to be devoured by one family, even with the help of the boys that came home from school with my brother and me to eat bread-and-butter and honey.

My father's farm was a quarter-section of ninety acres, and geese and bees went but a short way toward stocking it. It was divided into fields of corn and wheat and oats and pastures and meadows, as the crops rotated, and the wood-lot, which never rotated at all. The years were so

long to us children that the corn-field seemed always to have been the cornfield, and the meadow to have been always the meadow, just as the woods were always the woods.

And, oh! the woods! where the mandrakes grew and the squirrels lived; with its endless carpet of moss and leaves through which the snapdragons thrust their heads, with jack-in-the-pulpit, and the skunk's cabbage grew on the edge of the stagnant pool, and the violets, and the buttercups, and the tall phlox, and the puffballs, and the toadstools.

There was always something new to be discovered in this half-explored wilderness, where the acorns and the beechnuts and the walnuts sprouted under the