Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 256

More potent a charm to bring back that time of life than this record of a few pictures and a few remembered facts would be a catalogue of the minutiae which are of the very stuff of the mind, intrinsic, because they were known in the beginning not by the eye alone but by the hand that held them.

Flowers, stones, and small creatures, living and dead.

Pale yellow snapdragons that by pinching could be made to bite ; ;

seed-pods of the balsams that snapped like fire-crackers at a touch ; ;

red-and-yellow columbines whose round-tipped spurs were picked off and eaten for the honey in them ; ;

morning-glory buds which could be so grasped and squeezed that they burst like a blown-up paper bag ; ;

bright flowers from the trumpet vine that made `` gloves '' on the ends of ten waggling fingers.

Fuzzy caterpillars, snails with their sensitive horns, struggling grasshoppers held by their long hind legs and commanded to `` spit tobacco, spit ''.

Dead fledgling birds, their squashed-looking nakedness and the odor of decay that clung to the hand when they had been buried in our graveyard in front of the purple flags.

And the cast shell of a locust, straw-colored and transparent, weighing nothing, fragile but entire, with eyes like bubbles and a gaping slit down its back.

Every morning early, in the summer, we searched the trunks of the trees as high as we could reach for the locust shells, carefully detached their hooked claws from the bark where they hung, and stabled them, a weird faery herd, in an angle between the high roots of the tulip tree, where no grass grew in the dense shade.

We collected `` lucky stones '' -- all the creamy translucent pebbles, worn smooth and round, that we could find in the driveway.

When these had been pocketed, we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated.

We showed them to each other and said `` Would you have guessed ''??

Squatting on our haunches beside the flat stone we broke them on, we were safe behind the high closed gates at the end of the drive: safe from interruption and the observation and possible amusement of the passers-by.

Thus shielded, we played many foolish games in comfortable unselfconsciousness ; ;

even when the fences became a part of the game -- when a vine-embowered gate-post was the Sleeping Beauty's enchanted castle, or when Rapunzel let down her golden hair from beneath the crocketed spire, even then we paid little heed to those who went by on the path outside.