“She had property rights and we were trespassing on her property, and she forgave us our trespasses even though we went on trespassing. I would say now that she was a woman of rare inner grace who had gathered wisdom from potatoes and hollyhocks.”

-- Carl Sandburg, in his 1953 autobiography, “Always the Young Strangers,” which contains several pages on playing neighborhood ball in the 19th century. The above is a paean to a woman whose yard the boys traipsed through to retrieve their ball.