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“The trail of the trolley is over it all!” Old Hundred murmured, as we hastened northward, out of the village.

After we had walked some distance, Old Hundred said, “It ought to be around here somewhere, to the right of the road. I can’t make anything out, for these new houses.”

“There was a lane down to it,” said I, “and woods beyond.”

“Sure,” he cried, “Kingman’s woods; and it was called Kingman’s field.”

I sighted the ruins of a lane, between two houses. “Come on down to Kingman’s, fellers,” I shouted, “an’ choose up sides!”

Old Hundred followed my lead. We were in the middle of a potato patch, in somebody’s back yard. It was very small.

“This ain’t Kingman’s,” wailed Old Hundred, lapsing into bad grammar in his grief. “Why, it took an awful paste to land a home run over right field into the woods! And there ain’t no woods!”

There weren’t. Nevertheless, this was Kingman’s field. “See,” said I, trying to be cheerful, “here’s where home was.” And I rooted up a potato sprout viciously. “You and Bill Nichols always chose up. You each put a hand round a bat, alternating up the stick, for the first choice. The one who could get his hand over the top enough to swing the bat round his head three times, won, and chose Goodknocker Pratt. First was over there where the wall isn’t any more.”

“Remember the time we couldn’t find my ‘Junior League’,” said Old Hundred, “and Goodknocker dreamed it was in a tree, and the next day we looked in the trees, and there it was? I wonder what ever became of old Goodknocker?”

He moved toward first base. The woods had been ruthlessly cut down, and the wall dragged away in the process. We climbed a knoll, through the stumps and dead stuff. At the top was a snake bush.

“Here’s something, anyhow,” said Old Hundred. “You were Uncas and I was Hawk Eye, and we defended this snake bush from Bill’s crowd of Iroquois. We made shields out of barrel heads, and spears out of young pine-tree tops. Wow, how they hurt!”

“About half a mile over is the swamp where the traps were,” said I. “Let’s go. Maybe there’s something in one of ’em.”

“Then times would be changed,” said he, smiling a little.

We walked a few hundred feet, and there was the swamp, quite dried up without the protection of the woods, a tangle of dead stuff, and in plain view of half a dozen houses. “Why” cried Old Hundred, “it was miles away from anything!”

I looked at him, a woeful figure, clad in immaculate clothes, with gray gloves, a cane in his hand. “You ought to be wearing red mittens,” said I, “and carrying that old shot-gun, with the ramrod bent.”

“The ramrod was always bent,” said he. “It kept getting caught in twigs, or falling out. Gee, how she kicked! Remember the day I got the rabbit down there on the edge of the swamp? It made the snow all red, poor little thing. I guess I wasn’t so pleased as I expected to be.”

“I remember the day you didn’t get the wood pussy–soon enough,” I answered.

Just then a whistle shrieked. “Good Lord,” said Old Hundred, “there’s one of those infernal trolleys! It must go right up the turnpike, past Sandy.”

“Let’s take it!” I cried.

He looked at me savagely. “We’ll walk!” he said.

“But it’s miles and miles,” I remonstrated.

“Nevertheless,” said he, “we’ll walk.”

It was difficult to find the short cut in this tangle of slaughtered forest, but we got back to the road finally, coming out by the school-house. At least, we came out by a little shallow hole in the ground, half filled with poison-ivy and fire-weed, and ringed by a few stones. We paused sadly by the ruins.

“I suppose the trolly takes the kids into the village now,” said I. “Centralization, you know.”

“There used to be a great stove in one corner, and the pipe went all across the room,” Old Hundred was saying, as if to himself. “If you sat near it, you baked; if you didn’t, you froze. Do you remember Miss Campbell? What was it we used to sing about her? Oh, yes–