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Oh! how many hours have I spent at that window feeling like a caged sparrow, my spirit filled with vague reverie; and meantime my ink-blotted copy-book lay open before me, but no inspiration would come, and the composition that I was engaged upon got itself finished very laboriously,--often not at all.
And before long I began to play tricks upon the pedestrians, a fatal result of my idleness over which I often felt remorseful.
I am bound to confess that my great friend Lucette was usually a willing assistant in these pranks.

Although now almost a young lady sixteen or seventeen years of age, she was at times almost as much of a child as I.
"You must never tell any one!" she would say with an irrepressible smile of mischief in her merry eyes (but I may tell now after so many years have passed, now that the flowers of twenty summers have bloomed upon her grave).
Our pranks consisted of taking cherry stems, plum stones and any sort of trash, and wrapping them neatly into white or pink paper parcels that looked very attractive to the eye; we then threw these bundles into the street and hid ourselves behind the shutters to see who picked them up.
Sometimes we would write letters, impertinent or incoherent ones, with accompanying drawings to illustrate the text; these we addressed to the different eccentric people in our neighborhood, and, with the aid of a thread, we lowered them to the sidewalk at about the same time these persons were in the habit of passing.

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