presented Scipio Africanus is named Smith.
His family came to the village to live only a few weeks before the
school opened. Scipio is a very enterprising and ingenious lad.
Colonel Coffin's boy leaned over the fence one day and gave to me his
impressions of Scipio, a lad about fourteen years old:

"Yes, me and him are right well acquainted now; he knows more'n I do,
and he's had more experience. Bill says his father used to be a robber
(Smith, by the way, is a deacon in the Presbyterian church, and a very
excellent lawyer), and that he has ten million dollars in gold buried
in his cellar, along with a whole lot of human bones--people he's
killed. And he says his father is a conjurer, and that he makes all
the earthquakes that happen anywheres in the world. The old man'll
come home at night, after there's been an earthquake, all covered with
perspiration and so tired he kin hardly stand. Bill says it's such
hard work.

"And Bill tole me that once when a man came around there trying to
sell lightning-rods his father got mad and et him--et him right up;
and he takes bites out of everybody he comes acrost.

"That's what Bill tells me. That's all I know about it. And he tole me
that once he used to have a dog--one of these little kind of dogs--and
he was flying his kite, and just for fun he tied the kite-string
onto his dog's tail. And then the wind struck her and his dog went
a-scuddin' down the street with his hind legs in the air for about a
mile, when the kite all of a sudden begun to go up, and in about
a minute the dog was fifteen miles high and commanding a view of
California and Egypt, I think Bill said. He came down, anyhow, I know,
in Brazil, and Bill said he swum home all the way in the Atlantic
Ocean; and when he landed, his legs were all nibbled off by sharks.

"I wish father'd buy me a dog, so's I could send him up that way. But
I never have any luck. Bill said that where they used to live he went
out on the roof one day to fly his kite, and he sat on top of the
chimbly to give her plenty of room, and while he was sitting there
thinking about nothing, the old man put a keg of powder down below
in the fire-place to clean the soot out of the chimbly. And when he
touched her off, Bill was blowed over agin the Baptist church steeple,
and he landed on the weather-cock with his pants torn, and they
couldn't git him down for three days, so he hung there, going round
and round with the wind, and he lived by eating