s down on his knees and owns up to the truth, and swears
he'll do his best to git rid of the frog, and all the time he is
talking the frog is singing exercises and scales and oratorios inside
of him, and worse than ever, too, because Barnes drank a good deal of
ice-water that day, and it made the frog hoarse--ketched cold, you
know.

"But Miss Flickers, she refused him. Said she might've loved him, only
she couldn't marry any man that had continual music in his interior.

"So Barnes, he was the most disgusted man you ever saw. Perfectly sick
about it. And one day he was lying on the bed gaping, and that frog
unexpectedly made up its mind to come up to ask Barnes to eat more
carefully, maybe, and it jumped out on the counterpane. After looking
about a bit it came up and tried three or four times to hop back,
but he kept his mouth shut, and killed the frog with the back of a
hair-brush. Ever since then he runs his drinking-water through a
strainer, and he hates frogs worse than you and me hate pison. Now,
that's the honest truth about Barnes; you ask him if it ain't."

Then Keyser bought some tobacco and went home.

CHAPTER VI.

_THE EDITOR OF THE PATRIOT_.

The editor of the village paper, _The Patriot and Advertiser_, is
Major Slott; and a very clever journalist he is. Even his bitterest
adversary, the editor of _The Evening Mail_, in the town above us on
the river, admits that. In the last political campaign, indeed, _The
Mail_ undertook to tell how it was that the major acquired such a
taste for journalism. The story was that shortly after he was born the
doctor ordered that the baby should be fed upon goat's milk. This was
procured from a goat that was owned by an Irish woman who lived in the
rear of the office of _The Weekly Startler_ and fed her goat chiefly
upon the exchanges which came to that journal. The consequence,
according to _The Mail_, was that young Slott was fed entirely upon
milk formed from digested newspapers; and he throve on it, although
when the Irish woman mixed the Democratic journals carelessly with the
Whig papers they disagreed after they were eaten, and the milk gave
the baby colic. Old Slott intended the boy to be a minister; but as
soon as he was old enough to take notice he cried for every newspaper
that he happened to see, and no sooner did he learn how to write than
he began to slash off editorials upon "The Need of Reform," etc. He
ran away from school four times to ente