the entertainment had become nearly unbearable, he conceived the
idea of gripping them between his fingers and putting them out of
commission. He succeeded with many of them, but at great cost, for, as
he couldn't see the wasp, he was as likely to take hold of the wrong end
of him as he was the right; then the dying wasp gave him a punch to
remember the incident by.

If those ladies had stayed all day, and if all the wasps in Missouri had
come and climbed up Jim's legs, nobody there would ever have known it
but Jim and the wasps and me. There he would have sat until the ladies
left.

When they finally went away we went up-stairs and he took his clothes
off, and his legs were a picture to look at. They looked as if they were
mailed all over with shirt buttons, each with a single red hole in the
centre. The pain was intolerable--no, would have been intolerable, but
the pain of the presence of those ladies had been so much harder to bear
that the pain of the wasps' stings was quite pleasant and enjoyable by
comparison.

Jim never could enjoy wasps. I remember once--

_From Susy's Biography of Me_ [1885-6].

Mamma has given me a very pleasant little newspaper scrap about
papa, to copy. I will put it in here.

[_Thursday, October 11, 1906._] It was a rather strong compliment; I
think I will leave it out. It was from James Redpath.

The chief ingredients of Redpath's make-up were honesty, sincerity,
kindliness, and pluck. He wasn't afraid. He was one of Ossawatomie
Brown's right-hand men in the bleeding Kansas days; he was all through
that struggle. He carried his life in his hands, and from one day to
another it wasn't worth the price of a night's lodging. He had a small
body of daring men under him, and they were constantly being hunted by
the "jayhawkers," who were proslavery Missourians, guerillas, modern
free lances.

[_Friday, October 12, 1906._] ... I can't think of the name of that
daredevil guerilla who led the jayhawkers and chased Redpath up and
down the country, and, in turn, was chased by Redpath. By grace of the
chances of war, the two men never met in the field, though they several
times came within an ace of it.

Ten or twelve years later, Redpath was earning his living in Boston as
chief of the lecture business in the United States. Fifteen or sixteen
years after his Kansas adventures I became a public lecturer, and he was
my agent. Along there somewhere was a press dinner, one