since had to do with two other Sunday schools, where, though the children
did not know it, I felt as young as the youngest of them all. And in that
sort of life you get chances to come at nice boys and nice girls which
most people in the world do not have.

And the last of all the congresses of young people which I will name,
where I have found my favorites, shall be the vacation congresses,--when
people from all the corners of the world meet at some country hotel, and
wonder who the others are the first night, and, after a month, wonder
again how they ever lived without knowing each other as brothers and
sisters. I never had a nicer time than that day when we celebrated
Arthur's birthday by going up to Greely's Pond. "Could Amelia walk so
far? She only eight years old, and it was the whole of five miles by a
wood-road, and five miles to come back again." Yes, Amelia was certain she
could. Then, "whether Arthur could walk so far, he being nine." Why, of
course he could if Amelia could. So eight-year-old, nine-year-old,
ten-year-old, eleven-year-old, and all the rest of the ages,--we tramped
off together, and we stumbled over the stumps, and waded through the mud,
and tripped lightly, like Somnambula in the opera, over the log bridges,
which were single logs and nothing more, and came successfully to Greely's
Pond,--beautiful lake of Egeria that it is, hidden from envious and lazy
men by forest and rock and mountain. And the children of fifty years old
and less pulled off shoes and stockings to wade in it; and we caught in
tin mugs little seedling trouts not so long as that word "seedling" is on
the page, and saw them swim in the mugs and set them free again; and we
ate the lunches with appetites as of Arcadia; and we stumped happily home
again, and found, as we went home, all the sketch-books and bait-boxes
and neckties which we had lost as we went up. On a day like that you get
intimate, if you were not intimate before.