(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.) And turning to me as he moved away, he said:  “Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy—­I an’t going to be gone a second.”

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away.

At the door I met the sociable Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me and recommenced: 

“Well, this-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and—­”

“Oh, hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” I muttered, good-naturedly, and bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

FITZ HUGH LUDLOW. (BORN, 1836—­DIED, 1870.)

* * * * *

BEN THIRLWALL’S SCHOOLDAYS.

My name is Ben Thirlwall, and I am the son of rich but honest parents.  I never had a wish ungratified until I was twelve years of age.  My wish then was to stay on a two-year-old colt which had never been broken.  He did not coincide with me, and a vast revelation of the resistances to individual will of which the universe is capable, also of a terrestrial horizon, bottom upward, burst upon me during the brief space which I spent in flying over his head.  Picked up senseless, I was carried to the bosom of my family on a wheelbarrow, and awoke to the consciousness that my parents had decided on sending me to a boarding-school,—­a remedy to this day sovereign in the opinion of all well-regulated parents for all tangential aberrations from the back of a colt or the laws of society.

The principal’s name was Barker; and my only clue to his character consisted in overhearing that he was an excellent disciplinarian.  I was afraid to ask what that meant, but on reflection concluded it to be a geographical distinction, and, associating him with Mesopotamia or Beloochistan, expected to find him a person of mild manners, who shaved his head, wore a tall hat of dyed sheep’s wool, and did a large business in spices with people who visited him on camels in a front-yard surrounded by sheds, and having a fountain that played in the middle.

Having read several books of travels, I was corroborated in my view when I learned that Mr. Barker lived at the east, and still further, when on going around point Judith on the steamboat with my father, I became very sick at the stomach, as all the travellers had done in their first chapter.