ry, dressed in a blue wamus, his
breeches tucked in his boots, and an old hat on his head, with a hole
that let out his hair through the top. He had got out of a democrat
wagon, and was holding the lines hitched to a horse about forty years
old, that leaned against the hitching post to rest, "Only a shilling
apiece."

"O, go 'way," said the grocery man. "I only pay three cents apiece." And
then he looked at the boy and said "Hello, Hennery, is that you? I have
missed you all the week, and now you come on to me sudden, disguised as
a granger. What does this all mean?"

"It means that I have been the victim of as vile a conspiracy as ever
was known since Caeesar was stabbed, and Marc Antony orated over his
prostrate corpse in the Roman forum, to an audience of supes and scene
shifters," and the boy dropped the lines on the sidewalk, said, "whoa,
gol darn you," to the horse that was asleep, wiped his boots on the
grass in front of the store and came in, and seated himself on the old
half bushel. "There, this seems like home again."

"What's the row?--who has been playing it on you?" And the grocery man
smelled a sharp trade in cabbages, as well as other smells peculiar to
the farm.

"Well, I'll tell you. Lately our folks have been constantly talking of
the independent life of the farmer, and how easy it is, and how they
would like it if I would learn to be a farmer. They said there was
nothing like it, and several of the neighbors join'd in and said I had
the natural ability to be one of the most successful farmers in the
state. They all drew pictures of the fun it was to work on a farm where
you could get your work done and take your fish-pole and go off and
catch fish, or a gun, and go out and kill game, and how you could ride;
horses, and pitch hay, and smell the sweet perfume, and go to husking
bees, and dances, and everything, and they got me all worked up so I
wanted to go to work on a farm. Then an old deacon that belongs to our
church, who runs a farm about eight miles out of town, he came on the
scene, and said he wanted a boy, and if I would go out and work for him
he would be easy on me because he knew my folks, and we belonged to the
same church. I can see it now. It was all a put up job on me, just like
they play three card monte on a fresh stranger. I was took in. By gosh,
I have been out there a week, and here's what there is left of me. The
only way I got a chance to come to town was to tell the farmer