ear. Afterward he
sat out on the porch watching old Peg graze around the yard. I thought he
was in one of his absent-minded fits, but when I came out, he called me to
him, and, setting his lips to my ear, he whispered:

"'An' the seventh is a-goin' down-hill fast, so I hear!' He chuckled to
himself over this for some time, wagging his head feebly, and then he
said: 'I tell ye, Joey, I've lived a long time, and I've larned a lot
about the way folks is made. The trouble with most of 'em is, they're
fraid-cats! As Jeroboam Warner used to say--he was in the same rigiment
with me in 1812--the only way to manage this business of livin' is to give
a whoop and let her rip! If ye just about half-live, ye just the same as
half-die; and if ye spend yer time half-dyin', some day ye turn in and die
all over, without rightly meanin' to at all--just a kind o' bad habit
ye've got yerself inter.' Gran'ther fell into a meditative silence for a
moment. 'Jeroboam, he said that the evenin' before the battle of Lundy's
Lane, and he got killed the next day. Some live, and some die; but folks
that live all over die happy, anyhow! Now I tell you what's my motto, an'
what I've lived to be eighty-eight on--'"

Professor Mallory stood up and, towering over the younger man, struck one
hand into the other as he cried: "This was the motto he told me: 'Live
while you live, and then die and be done with it!'"

AS A BIRD OUT OF THE SNARE

After the bargain was completed and the timber merchant had gone away,
Jehiel Hawthorn walked stiffly to the pine-tree and put his horny old fist
against it, looking up to its spreading top with an expression of hostile
exultation in his face. The neighbor who had been called to witness the
transfer of Jehiel's woodland looked at him curiously.

"That was quite a sight of money to come in without your expectin', wa'n't
it?" he said, fumbling awkwardly for an opening to the question he burned
to ask.

Jehiel did not answer. The two old men stood silent, looking down the
valley, lying like a crevasse in a glacier between the towering white
mountains. The sinuous course of the frozen river was almost black under
the slaty sky of March.

"Seems kind o' providential, havin' so much money come to you just now,
when your sister-in-law's jest died, and left you the first time in your
life without anybody you got to stay and see to, don't it?" commented the
neighbor persistently.

Jehiel made a vague sign with