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splits. If the horse chestnuts are ready to use, they’ll be brown, a real wonderful glossy brown.
    If you split a couple of burrs open and find they’re white, or part white and part brown, or very light brown, you’ll have to go away for a day or two and try again.
    Now let’s say you’ve waited and you’ve got a bunch of horse chestnuts. By the way, when we were kids, the horse chestnut tree in my neighborhood was on a neighbor’s lawn. It might be a good idea to ask if you can go get them, if your horse chestnut tree is on a neighbor’s lawn.
Not that anyone wants them but kids, but the ones you can’t reach, you’ll jump for, and if that doesn’t do it, you’ll shy a branch up into the tree to knock them down, and if the neighbor has just invested three million dollars in new grass seed, he may not like having it all covered over with branches and burrs and kids. But I’m sure he won’t be a grouch about it. Chances are when he was a kid he did the same thing, and you’ll come home with as many horse chestnuts as you can carry. I don’t have to tell you to look at them, because they’re the nicest things in the world to look at, and you’ll be doing that anyway. If you want them to shine more, take them and rub them up against the side of your nose. Perhaps you’ve seen your father or someone do that with a pipe. There’s oil on everybody’s skin there and it oils up the chestnut or the pipe and makes it shine.
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    Okay, now you have some horse chestnuts, and they’re fun to get and fun to open the burrs and fun to look at and fun to shine. There are things you can do with horse chestnuts, too.
    You can’t eat them, at least I never could, but here’s a game you can play with them. This, like mumbly-peg, is a game you need another kid to play with, but getting the horse chestnuts ready is something you can do by yourself. Pick out the ones that look good and solid. Now, bore a hole right through them, through the center of that rough, woody little part right through to the other side. You can do this with the mumbly-peg blade of your Scout knife, or with a long nail. We used to do it with an ice-pick, but I imagine a lot of you have never seen or heard of an ice-pick. When I was a kid it was darn near the handiest tool in the house. That was before electric refrigerators, and the way we used to keep food cool was, a man came in a horse and wagon every other day, or even every day in the summer. In the back of his wagon were great big chunks of ice, as tall as I was when I was little. He would ask my mother how much ice she wanted. She’d tell him a fifty-pound
piece or a hundred-pound piece, and he’d take out his ice-pick—it was just a long sharp steel point set in a handle—and he’d chip a little line along the great big piece of ice and like magic, the big piece would break right along the line and there would be a fifty-pound piece. In the summer, we’d always wait for the ice man because when the ice split there’d be pieces of ice just the right size for putting in your mouth. Then he’d take a tongs that looked like this, jab both points in the ice, and sling the fifty-pound piece of ice up on his shoulder. He had a kind of leather pad up there. He’d carry it into the house and put it in the ice-box, just a big wooden chest with a door on the front. That’s what kept the food cool.
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    Well, each house had an ice-pick too, in case you wanted a smaller piece of ice, for putting in a pitcher of water or lemonade or something. So we always knew where the ice-pick was, right on the side of the ice box, and when we wanted to drill holes in horse chestnuts or belts or whatever, we went looking for the ice-pick.
    You see, we didn’t always know where our Scout knife was—if we had one—any more than you do.

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    Well, so you bore a hole in your