wounded five or six more pretty
bad," resumed Nucky, "and the fighting it went on, off and on, all
winter. Every now and then, of a moonlight night, the Cheever boys would
start to tear down the fence and set it back up; but we kep' a constant
lookout, and was allus ready for 'em. Finally they got discouraged
trying to fight Blant in the open, and tuck to ambushing. Three of 'em
laywayed Blant under a cliff one day in April, and Elhannon got kilt,
and Todd and Dalt so bad wounded they left the country and went West.
They are the youngest and feistiest of the lot,--t'other boys is mostly
married and settled, and not anxious to risk their lives again' Blant's
gun no more--and sence they went off, we have had a spell of peace."

"What do you do in the war?"

"Oh, I keep a lookout, and spy around, and stand guard over the fence
with my gun."

"Gee, I wisht I had a war in my family!" sighed Philip, fervently.

_Thursday._

Two more nights of suffering,--Philip said to me this morning, "I heared
you up a-fleaing four or five times in the night." When I found that
several panels of the back fence had been washed away by the "tide" of
week-before-last, and that neighborhood hogs were coming in and out at
will, and making their beds under my very room, I did not wonder.

This morning at the breakfast table, Philip's face was so dingy that I
inquired, "Have you washed your face?"

"Yes," was his reply.

Something moved me to inquire further, "When?"

"Day before yesterday," he replied, with perfect nonchalance.

This is dangerous,--already I can see that Philip is to be, like his
illustrious namesake "the glass of fashion and the mold of form," and
that the younger boys, will be only too ready to omit disagreeable rites
if he does.

Poor Keats, who in the matter of beauty certainly lives up to his name,
really seems inconsolable. While he cleans the chicken-yard in the
mornings, my heart is wrung by hearing him chant the most dismal of
songs,

Oh bury me not, on the broad pa-ra-a-ree,
Where the wild ky-oats will holler over me!

and in the hour after supper, when the others play out of doors, he
sits with me, telling about Nervesty and the four little children at
home, and the spell of typhoid all the family had last year, when his
father and little sister Dicey died, and how "Me 'n' Nervesty and Hen"
have run the farm since then, tending fifteen acres of corn, besides
clearing new-ground, and oth