made a very shining success out of their attempts on the
simpleton from “old Shelby.” Experimenters grew scarce
and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.
There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare
Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.
He had a noble new skeleton–the skeleton of the late
and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village
drunkard–a grisly piece of property which he had bought
of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,
under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in
the tan-yard a fortnight before his death. The fifty
dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably
hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.
The doctor would put Jimmy Finn’s skeleton in Nicodemus’s
bed!
This was done–about half past ten in the evening.
About Nicodemus’s usual bedtime–midnight–the village
jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson
weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.
They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the
long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt,
and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly
back and forth, and wheezing the music of “Camptown Races”
out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing
against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top,
and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles,
five pounds of “store” candy, and a well-gnawed slab of
gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.
He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three
dollars and was enjoying the result!
Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were
drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard
a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside. We saw men
and women standing away up there looking frightened,
and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering
down the steep slope toward us. We got out of the way,
and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.
He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him
to do but trust to luck and take what might come.
When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is
no stopping till the bottom is reached. Think of people
FARMING on a slant which is so steep that the best you can
say of it–if you want to be fastidiously accurate–is,
that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite
so steep as a mansard roof. But that is what they do.
Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg
were stood up “edgeways.” The boy was wonderfully jolted up,
and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from
small stones on the way.
Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone,
and by that time the men and women had scampered down
and brought his cap.
Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring
cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted,
and stared at, and commiserated, and water was
brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.
And such another clatter of tongues! All who had seen
the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each
trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth
of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill,
called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us,
and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.
Harris and I were included in all the descriptions;
how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted;
how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like
a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way,
and let him come; and with what presence of mind we
picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock
when the performance was over. We were as much heroes
as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized;
we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter’s
mother’s cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese,
and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most