owledge for the good o' the world and they'll be as eager to get
it as they are what ye know about the shooting. And nobody'll want to
kill ye. Every man o' them'll want to keep ye alive. But mind, ye must
be the _principal witness_."

Deacon Binks arrived, a fat man with a big round body and a very wise
and serious countenance between side whiskers bending from his temple to
his neck and suggesting parentheses of hair, as if his head and its
accessories were in the nature of a side issue. He and the schoolmaster
went out-of-doors and must have talked together while I was eating a
bowl of bread and milk which Mrs. Hacket had brought to me.

When I went to bed, by and by, I heard somebody snoring on the little
porch under my window. The first sound that reached my ear at the break
of dawn was the snoring of the same sleeper. I dressed and went below
and found the constable in his coon-skin overcoat asleep on the porch
with a long-barreled gun at his side. While I stood there the
schoolmaster came around the corner of the house from the garden. He
smiled as he saw the deacon.

"Talk about the placid rest of Egyptian gods!" he exclaimed. "Look at
the watchful eye o' Justice. How well she sleeps in this peaceful
valley! Sometimes ye can hardly wake her up at all, at all."

He put his hand on the deacon's shoulder and gave him a little shake.

"Awake, ye limb o' the law," he demanded. "Prayer is better than sleep."

The deacon arose and stretched himself and cleared his throat and
assumed an air of alertness and said it was a fine morning, which it was
not, the sky being overcast and the air dank and chilly. He removed his
greatcoat and threw it on the stoop saying:

"Deacon, you lay there. From now on I'm constable and ready for any act
that may be necessary to maintain the law. I can be as severe as
Napoleon Bonaparte and as cunning as Satan, if I have to be."

I remember that through the morning's work the sleepy deacon and the
alert constable contended over the possession of his stout frame.

The constable shouldered the gun and followed me into the pasture where
I went to get the cow. I saw now that his intention was to guard me from
further attacks. While I was milking, the deacon sat on a bucket in the
doorway of the stable and snored until I had finished. He awoke when I
loosed the cow and the constable went back to the pasture with me,
yawning with his hand over his mouth much of the way. The deacon leaned