hone in his face.

It may be that Jim Wolf was as bashful as Harris. It hardly seems
possible, yet as I look back fifty-six years and consider Jim Wolf, I am
almost persuaded that he was. He was our long slim apprentice in my
brother's printing-office in Hannibal. He was seventeen, and yet he was
as much as four times as bashful as I was, though I was only fourteen.
He boarded and slept in the house, but he was always tongue-tied in the
presence of my sister, and when even my gentle mother spoke to him he
could not answer save in frightened monosyllables. He would not enter a
room where a girl was; nothing could persuade him to do such a thing.
Once when he was in our small parlor alone, two majestic old maids
entered and seated themselves in such a way that Jim could not escape
without passing by them. He would as soon have thought of passing by one
of Harris's plesiosaurians ninety feet long. I came in presently, was
charmed with the situation, and sat down in a corner to watch Jim
suffer, and enjoy it. My mother followed a minute later and sat down
with the visitors and began to talk. Jim sat upright in his chair, and
during a quarter of an hour he did not change his position by a
shade--neither General Grant nor a bronze image could have maintained
that immovable pose more successfully. I mean as to body and limbs; with
the face there was a difference. By fleeting revealments of the face I
saw that something was happening--something out of the common. There
would be a sudden twitch of the muscles of the face, an instant
distortion, which in the next instant had passed and left no trace.
These twitches gradually grew in frequency, but no muscle outside of the
face lost any of its rigidity, or betrayed any interest in what was
happening to Jim. I mean if something _was_ happening to him, and I knew
perfectly well that that was the case. At last a pair of tears began to
swim slowly down his cheeks amongst the twitchings, but Jim sat still
and let them run; then I saw his right hand steal along his thigh until
half-way to his knee, then take a vigorous grip upon the cloth.

That was a _wasp_ that he was grabbing! A colony of them were climbing
up his legs and prospecting around, and every time he winced they
stabbed him to the hilt--so for a quarter of an hour one group of
excursionists after another climbed up Jim's legs and resented even the
slightest wince or squirm that he indulged himself with, in his misery.
When