hair
sprang Elster; up from his bed bounced Sprigg, and by the time the
door, with a ringing click of its wooden latch, swung open, both were
there, and both hugged tight in the long, strong arms of husband and
father.

"Heaven be thanked!" exclaimed Elster, kissing her husband for the----,
but I must not say what number of times.

"The moccasins! the moccasins!--where are my red moccasins?" cried
Sprigg, who had not kissed nor hugged his father once.

"You young feather-pate! you jay-bird!" exclaimed Jervis. "Can't you
give your poor pap some little sign of welcome first?"

"Oh! then, you have got them! You have got them!" And now, assured that
such was the case, Sprigg could find it in his heart to hug and kiss his
father, which he did as sleekly and lovingly as any he-kitten. But
Sprigg paid for this bit of selfishness, and that dearly, too. Having
laid Black Bess in the rifle-hooks over the fireplace, and hung his
bearskin cap on the hook to the left and his ammunition pouch and powder
horn on the hook to the right, Jervis hugged and kissed his wife again.
Then, from the capacious game bag which, slung by a strap from the
shoulder, he wore at his side, he began drawing out slowly and with
great show of carefulness a small package, which Sprigg instinctively
knew to be the object of his heart's desire. The next moment, held high
aloft in pap's right hand, there they were at last, in plain view
before his eyes, the long dreamed of red moccasins. How beautiful looked
they. Trimmed with the finest of fur and glittering all over with the
brightest of beads, to say nothing of the color--red, as the reddest of
leather could be, not dyed in blood. You would have laughed, or,
perhaps, felt more like crying, to have seen the poor, vain boy, as he
stood there, with his heart in his eyes, gazing gloatingly up at the
moccasins as if the very shine of them had charmed him out of his
senses. Thus he stood for several moments till, giving a quick turn of
the head, he glanced sharply up at the Indian boy on the show bill, as
if half expecting to find the young horseman stripped of his moccasins
and now performing his equestrian antics in bare feet.

"Jervis," said Elster, grieved and provoked, "I am so surprised that you
should indulge our boy in so ridiculous a fancy, as were he, after all,
the monkey he would make himself. I had no idea that you would ever give
the whim a second thought. Why did you not get him the boots you