that reflection on my bravery.

CHAPTER IX

THE LOST OXEN

It was now approaching time to tap the maples again; but owing to the
disaster which had befallen our effort to make maple syrup for profit
the previous spring, neither Addison nor myself felt much inclination to
undertake it. The matter was talked over at the breakfast table one
morning and noting our lukewarmness on the subject, the old Squire
remarked that as the sugar lot had been tapped steadily every spring for
twenty years or more, it would be quite as well perhaps to give the
maples a rest for one season.

That same morning, too, Tom Edwards came over in haste to tell us, with
a very sober face, that their oxen had disappeared mysteriously, and ask
us to join in the search to find them. They were a yoke of "sparked"
oxen--red and white in contrasting patches. Each had wide-spread horns
and a "star" in his face. Bright and Broad were their names, and they
were eight years old.

Neighbor Jotham Edwards was one of those simpleminded, hard-working
farmers who ought to prosper but who never do. It is not easy to say
just what the reason was for much of his ill fortune. Born under an
unlucky planet, some people said; but that, of course, is childish. The
real reason doubtless was lack of good judgment in his business
enterprises.

Whatever he undertook nearly always turned out badly. His carts and
ploughs broke unaccountably, his horses were strangely prone to run away
and smash things, and something was frequently the matter with his
crops. Twice, I remember, he broke a leg, and each time he had to lie
six weeks on his back for the bone to knit. Felons on his fingers
tormented him; and it was a notable season that he did not have a big,
painful boil or a bad cut from a scythe or from an axe. One mishap
seemed to lead to another.

Jotham's constant ill fortune was the more noticeable among his
neighbors because his father, Jonathan, had been a careful, prosperous
farmer who kept his place in excellent order, raised good crops and had
the best cattle of any one thereabouts. Within a few years after the
place had passed under Jotham's control it was mortgaged, the buildings
and the fences were in bad repair, and the fields were weedy. Yet that
man worked summer and winter as hard and as steadily as ever a man did
or could.

Two winters before he had contracted with old Zack Lurvey to cut three
hundred thousand feet of hemlock logs and draw th