ethod was
an ungainly cross between a hurl and a jerk, took up the fusillade on
her own account, with the result that Crazy was wrought up to the
highest point of excitement, and, as I had foreseen, brought each stone
back to my grandmother, barking joyously and pulling at her skirts for
her to throw again.

"And just wait till I get you home," gasped Mrs. Mary Lyon, shaking her
rough white head, "there shall a rope be put about your neck, my lad!"

But whether for the purpose of mere tying up, or to carry out the
extreme sentence of the law, I did not gather. I resolved that, in the
latter case, Crazy should come with me to the school-house. There was a
place I knew of there, a crib at the end of the stick-cellar, which at a
pinch would do admirably for Crazy. And I felt sure that Crazy, wholly
incompetent at his own business of shepherding, would be a perfect
"boys' dog" and a permanent acquisition to the Academy of Eden Valley.
There was, of course, my father to consider. But I did not stop to think
of that. The classics and Fred Esquillant were enough for him at the
moment.

As she passed various cottage doors my grandmother had several bouts
with joiners who blocked the road with unfinished carts and diffusive
pots of red paint, with small wayside cowherds in charge of animals
which considered the hedge-rows as their appointed pasturage, with boys
going fishing who had learned at school that a straight line is the
shortest distance between two points, and who practised their Euclid to
the detriment of their neighbours' fences.

But nothing of great moment occurred till, on the same knoll from which
he had summoned us to view the smoke of the ghost's afternoon fire at
Marnhoul, we encountered Boyd Connoway. He was stretched at length, as
usual, one leg crossed negligently over the other. He had pivoted his
head against a log for the purpose of seeing in three directions about
him--towards the Great House, and both up and down the main road. A
straw, believed to be always the same, was in his mouth.

A red rag to a bull, a match to tinder, are weak metaphors--quite
incapable of expressing a tenth of what my grandmother felt at the sight
of the pet idler of Eden Valley.

She rushed instantly to the assault, much as she would have led a
forlorn hope. The dragoons who plunged their swords into great mows of
straw in Covenanting barns, the unfortunates who pursued a needle
through a load of hay, were employed in h