That fox had a 'brush'
as big 'round as your leg, the biggest fox-tail I ever saw. He had been
coming around the barns for some time; I used to hear him bark,
mornings, about four o'clock."

The Old Squire then went on, at length, to tell me how he watched for
the fox, and how he loaded the old "United-States-piece" musket for it,
and how he finally fired and shot the fox, but that the gun nearly broke
his collar-bone, he had loaded it so heavily. He was nigh half an hour
telling me all about it, and in spite of myself, I grew somewhat
interested.

"Why, how these mosquitoes do bite!" he finally exclaimed, giving one a
rousing slap. "Let's go in before they eat us up, and go to bed."

I went in with him and went to bed, but my trouble had now cankered too
deeply to be easily calmed. In the blackness of the bedchamber it beset
me again. Like other maladies, nostalgia, when once set up, must run its
course, I suppose. It never has appeared to me that I slept at all that
night, yet perhaps I did. Long before daylight, however, I was again
shedding hot tears and laying wild plans. But my thoughts had now taken
on an even gloomier and more desperate shade. What was the use of my
going home, I thought; my mother did not want me there. What was the use
of living in such a hopelessly dreary world! Live there at the Old
Squire's I could not, would not; of that I was certain. I never could
endure it. The thought of existing there, as I then felt, week after
week and month after month, was simply unbearable. Better die at once. I
began to think of various cases of suicide of which I had heard, or
read--in my happier days: the rope, poison, drowning. The latter I
believed to be the easier method of death; and I thought of the Little
Sea down where we washed the sheep and had begun to go in swimming on
warm days. There was water enough there in the deepest place;--and once
in, it would soon be over!

As the hours of the night dragged by, I began to take a morbid pleasure
in thinking about it, as if I had fully decided the question. I really
believed that I had as good as decided to drown myself; and when at
length we were called at five o'clock, I rose to dress in a very
unhealthy frame of mind.

"What's the matter with you?" exclaimed Halstead, as we were putting on
our shoes.

"Nothing," said I, heavily.

"You look as if you had lost your best friend," said he, with an
unsympathetic grin.

"I shall lose something more