PEEP AT OUR NEIGHBORS. 145

see, reader, what a compliment was paid
to my new skates. ‘The schoolmaster,
in the opinion of us boys, was a perfect
Solomon, and in our way of thinking,
Willow Lane embraced a much greater
share of the habitable globe than our
school atlas, in after days, when we
. studied Morse’s geography, gave it credit
for embracing.

Well, I mounted the skates. Skate
navigation, at first, is not very easy.
Every boy, in his first efforts to skate,
can easily understand how perilous were
some of my earliest attempts to imitate
the feats of the larger boys. I fell some
half a dozen times, and once or twice flat