n knife around Killis's throat. With a shinny-stick, I
knocked up one knife after the other, and kept death at bay until four
of the grown-up boys arrived and with difficulty separated the heroes
and escorted them to the hospital to have their wounds staunched and
dressed. Later, I heard that Nucky had begun it by leaping upon Killis
with the words, "I'll show you Hector haint dead yet!"

[Illustration: "'Fight, dogs, you haint no kin, 'F you kill one another,
taint no sin!'"]

To-night when I had the two in durance vile, and talked to them more
severely than I had yet done on the evils of fighting, Nucky, the
aggressor, gave as his excuse that his great-great-great-grandpaw had
fit the British, his great-great-grandpaw the Indians, his
great-grandpaw the Mexicans, his grandpaw the Rebels, and his paw and
Blant the Cheevers ever since he could recollect, and that he himself
was just bound to fight.

This was sound reasoning; and it brought before me with hitherto
unrealized force the fact that these boys are in very truth the sons of
heroes,--of forefathers who fought gloriously for freedom in the
Revolution, afterward subdued the wilderness and the savages, and have
since poured forth as one man from their fastnesses to safeguard the
Union in every emergency; and that here, forgotten and neglected by an
ungrateful state and nation, is the precious stuff of which great
patriots and heroes are made.

Therefore I did not upbraid Nucky and Killis further; I merely explained
to them the difference between fighting just to be fighting, and
fighting to save one's country, and, since they had no idea who the
"British," the "Mexicans" and the "Rebels" were, told them something of
the history and causes of those wars, and how I hoped that they, too,
when necessary, would fight for their nation. And though to them at
first their country meant their mountains only, and they were surprised
to hear that the great "level land" beyond was also theirs to love and
fight for, their affections were hospitable, and with one voice they
demanded that an enemy of the nation be produced at once.

Here endeth the Trojan War,--I see that it has fanned a flame already
too intense. Even little Jason slipped out under the benches at church
this morning, while I played the organ, and was found an hour later out
in the road in front of the court-house, covered with mud, but glowing
with the white-hot joy of having "whupped-out four-at-a-time" of