When You Were a Boy

by Edwin L. Sabin

The butt slammed you under the chin, knocking your teeth together upon your lower lip. You noted it not.

“We got him! We got him!”

Thus Hen, tumbling over the rail fence, was wildly bellowing—with a pardonable extension of the subject pronoun.

“Hurrah!”

You were on your feet in a twinkling, and were dashing in the wake of Hen, up the incline, midway of which, just below the stump, on his side lay the woodchuck, limp and still.

Hen circumspectly reached and stirred him with the tip of a toe; then, emboldened into the attitude of Victor, recklessly kicked him.

“He’s dead!”

“Je-rusalem! I should say he was!” you agreed, poking the inert mass. “Wasn’t that a dandy shot, though?”

“You bet!” praised Hen.

And so it was—considering the attendant circumstances.