hich he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at
auction, for fifty dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very
sick in the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had
gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of
ownership in the skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in
Nicodemus's bed!

This was done--about half past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus's
usual bedtime--midnight--the village jokers came creeping stealthily
through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.
They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the long-legged pauper,
on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was dangling
his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown
Races" out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing against his
mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, and solid india-rubber
ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of "store" candy, and
a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of
sheet-music. He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three
dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into
the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the
steep hillside. We saw men and women standing away up there looking
frightened, and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down
the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way, and when the object
landed in the road it proved to be a boy. He had tripped and fallen, and
there was nothing for him to do but trust to luck and take what might
come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is no stopping
till the bottom is reached. Think of people FARMING on a slant which is
so steep that the best you can say of it--if you want to be fastidiously
accurate--is, that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite
so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do. Some of the little
farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg were stood up "edgeways."
The boy was wonderfully jolted up, and his head was bleeding, from cuts
which it had got from small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone, and by that time
the men and women had scampered down and brought his cap.

Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring cottages
and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted, and star