ergy, which needed only proper direction to
accomplish wonders.

"You can't never tell," continued the driver, shifting his quid. "Now,
I've took folks up there goin' on ten year now, an' some I've took up
looked considerable more healthy than I be when I took 'em up. Comin'
back, howsumever, it was different. One young feller rode up with me in
the rain one night, a-singin' an' a-whistlin' to beat the band, an' when I
took him back, a month or so arterward, he had a striped nurse on one side
of him an' a doctor on t' other, an' was wearin' a shawl. Couldn't hardly
set up, but he was a-tryin' to joke just the same. 'Hank,' says he, when
we got a little way off from the place, 'my book of life has been edited
by the librarians an' the entire appendix removed.' Them's his very words.
'An',' says he, 'the time to have the appendix took out is before it does
much of anythin' to your table of contents.'

"The doctor shut him up then, an' I didn't hear no more, but I remembered
the language, an' arterwards, when I got a chanst, I looked in the
school-teacher's dictionary. It said as how the appendix was sunthin'
appended or added to, but I couldn't get no more about it. I've hearn tell
of a 'devil child' with a tail to it what was travellin' with the circus
one year, an' I've surmised as how mebbe a tail had begun to grow on this
young feller an' it was took off."

"You don't say!" ejaculated the blacksmith.

By reason of his professional connection with the sanitarium, Mr. Henry
Blake was, in a sense, the oracle of Judson Centre, and he enjoyed his
proud distinction to the full. Ordinarily, he was taciturn, but the
present hour found him in a conversational mood.

"He's married," he went on, returning to the original subject. "I took him
an' his wife up to the Jack-o'-Lantern last night. Come in on the nine
forty-seven from the Junction. Reckon they're goin' to stay a spell,
'cause they've got trunks--one of a reasonable size, an' 'nother that
looks like a dog-house. Box, too, that's got lead in it."

"Books, maybe," suggested the blacksmith, with unexpected discernment.
"Schoolteacher boarded to our house wunst an' she had most a car-load of
'em. Educated folks has to have books to keep from losin' their
education."

"Don't take much stock in it myself," remarked the driver. "It spiles most
folks. As soon as they get some, they begin to pine an' hanker for more. I
knowed a feller wunst that begun with one book droppe