“Who told you?”
“Oh, I just guessed.”
“Well, I’m blessed! Ghoisters! You never seed a pig in a nest up a tree seven hundred feet high?”
“Not that I remember, Abe.”
“Gum! Yes, sir; there were a pig in that nest. Them birds, sonny, had kept me off till their squabs could fly, and then they played that joke on me. I chucked the pig out, and when I got down he were as dead as bacon. Come to think of it, sonny, it were a kind thought of them eagles to put it up there, and it makes me smile every time to think of the way them birds laughed till they shook their feathers out.”
The old man fixed his abstracted gaze on a cloud of tobacco smoke.
“I hope to train ’em next year,” he said, “to keep me in venison and lard. Going? Well, so long!”
“So long, Abe!”