that's spilt;
When you hasten, slowly go;
Keep your conscience clear of guilt.

These old rules, which here in verse
You behold thus newly set,
Well it would be to rehearse,
Till not one you could forget.

A PERILOUS RIDE.

By W. Bert Foster.

"So you boys think you came down here pretty fast, eh?" asked Randy
Bronson, crossing one wooden leg over the other and stretching them both
out toward the great fire of hickory logs that were roaring in the
chimney.

Seven of us academy boys had piled into the only double cutter the
village livery stable possessed, and had covered the nine miles between
the school and Randy's place down on the river road in forty-five
minutes, and for a pair of farm horses we thought that pretty good time.
Randy's suppers, or rather his wife Maria's suppers, were famous, and
the doctor was always willing to let a party of us off for an evening at
their little establishment providing we were back in good season. Randy
and his wife were to be trusted to look out for the most harum-scarum
boy who ever attended the Edgewood Academy.

While supper was being prepared we gathered about Randy and the wide
open fireplace to wait for the repast, with all the patience at our
command.

If Maria Bronson's suppers had gained a reputation among us, so had
Randy's stories. He had been a sailor in his youth, and, indeed, in
middle life, until during a naval engagement on the lower Mississippi,
in the civil war, he had both legs shot away, and was doomed to "peg
about," as he jocularly called it, on wooden substitutes.

"So you thought you came down here pretty fast?" asked Randy, repeating
the remark which opened this narrative. "And well you might, with the
roads in the condition they are now. But I've been sleighing faster than
any of you boys have traveled, unless it was on a railroad train, and
over the roughest sort of a track, too."

We all foresaw a story at once and were eager enough to hear the tale.
So with little urging Randy began:

"When I was a boy you know I went to sea," he said, and we all nodded
acquiescence, for about every story Randy told commenced with just that
remark. "My parents died when I was young and I was bound out to an old
uncle; but farming wasn't to my taste, and I was always longing so for
salt water that finally he told me I wasn't worth my board and clothes,
and to clear out and go to sea if I wanted to.