eyard above the Forks.

"Tell me," said the boy, laying his hand on the arm of his companion,
and looking earnestly and sadly in his face, "Tell me, Tim, why it is
that they always have the graveyard on a hill. Is it because it is a
little nearer to heaven?"

His companion did not understand. And yet he did understand, and was
silent.

They sat down together by and by and looked up out of the great canon at
the drifting white clouds, and the boy said, looking into heaven, as if
to himself,

"O! fleets of clouds that flee before
The burly winds of upper seas."

Then as the sudden twilight fell and they went down the hill together,
the white crooked moon, as if it had just been broken from off the snow
peak that it had been hiding behind, came out with a star.

"How the red star hangs to the moon's white horn."

There was no answer, for his companion was awed to utter silence.

One day, Bunker Hill, a humped-back and unhappy woman of uncertain ways,
passed through the crowd in the Forks. Some of the rough men laughed and
made remarks. This boy was there also. Lifting his eyes to one of these
men at his side, he said:

"God has made some women a little plain, in order that he might have
some women that are wholly good."

These things began to be noised about. All things have their
culmination. Even the epizootic has one worst day. Things only go so
far. Rockets only rise so high, then they explode, and all is dark and
still.

The Judge stood straddled out before the roaring fire of the Howling
Wilderness one night, tilting up the tails of his coat with his two
hands which he had turned in behind him, as he stood there warming the
upper ends of his short legs, and listening to these questions and the
comments of the men. At last, he seemed to have an inspiration, and
tilting forward on his toes, and bringing his head very low down, and
his coat-tails very high up, he said, solemnly:

"Fellow-citizens, it's a poet."

Then bringing out his right hand, and reaching it high in the air, as he
poised on his right leg:

"In this glorious climate of Californy--"

"Be gad, it is!" cried an Irishman, jumping up, "a Bryan! A poet, a
rale, live, Lord O'Bryan."

And so the status of the strange boy was fixed at the Forks. He was
declared to be a poet, and was no more a wonder. Curiosity was
satisfied.

"It is something to know that it is no worse," growled a very practical
old man, as he held a pipe in hi