high-cheek-boned men with feverish eyes, like himself. "Take heed to the word, Brother Saunders," they'd say: "'Spare the rod and spoil the child.'" So father'd refuse to spare the rod, and he'd spoil me for the time being, anyhow.

They weren't all men of that stamp, though. You can't get a crowd of fools to hold together unless there's a rascal to lead them. Anker was the boss of the business—and a proper coyote he was. A little man, him; long-nosed and slit-eyed; whispered, mostly, from behind his hand. He had it in for me, most particular. First place, I nicknamed him "Canker" and it stuck; next place, one day me and Tom, Mattie's brother, being then about sixteen apiece, come up from swimming and stopped at Anker's patch to pull a turnip. While we sat there, cutting off slices and enjoying it, never thinking of having harmed the man, Anker slides out to us, so quiet we couldn't hear him till he was right there, and calls us a pair of reprobates and thieves. I never liked the sound of that word "thief." He got the turnip. He'd have got worse, too, but Tom slung the sleeve of his shirt around my neck and choked me down.

The turnip sent him to grass. As he got up, smiling with half his mouth, and wiping turnip off his manly brow, "You'll regret this, young man," says he; "some day you'll be sorry for this."

Poor Tom had his hands full holding me. "Well, you'd better run along," says he; "for if this shirt gives way, you'll regret it to-day."

Anker was a man to give advice, generally. When he cast an eye on me, foaming and r'aring, he concluded he'd take the same, for once, and ambled out of that.

He kept his word, though. He made me regret it. You'd hardly believe a man near fifty years old would hold a grudge against a sixteen-year-old boy hard enough to lie about him on every occasion, and poison the boy's father's mind, would you? That's the facts. He stirred the old man up by things he "really didn't like to tell, you know, but felt it his painful duty"—and so forth. Yes, sir; he made me regret it plenty. You might say he broke our home up. And so, if ever I meet that gentleman in the hereafter, above or below, him and me is going to have some kind of a scuffle—but shucks! There's no use getting excited over it at my age. The good Lord's attended to his case all right, without any help from me.

In all kinds of little things mother and father were separated by miles. Take the case of old Eli Perkins, the tin-peddler, for instance. Mother used to love to buy 

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