Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays

[30] or were somehow developed from one another. On other days I played a game of football a mile long, trying to kick before me some particular stone or horse-chestnut for the whole distance from the school door to my own gate; sometimes betting heavily with myself, and perhaps losing manfully, like Dick Swiveller at his solitary cribbage. Then in winter there was always the hope of “punging,” getting a ride on the runners of a sleigh, or hitching my sled behind some vehicle; and in spring that of riding with the driver of an empty ice-cart or walking beside a full one, and watching the fine horses that then, in endless procession, drew heavy wagons bearing the winter harvest of Fresh Pond to be shipped to distant lands.

My most immediate playmate was the next-door neighbor, already mentioned, who in later life was a medical professor in Brown University. He was a prim, grave little boy, and was called “old-fashioned;” he was very precocious, and though only three months older than myself was a year before me in college, graduating at just seventeen,--each of us being the youngest in our respective classes. There was between our houses only the field now occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium and the Scientific School; and while we were not schoolmates,