"Well, preachers can't take no money for preaching—it would be a sin—and they haint got much time for tending craps and such, and less'n they good traders they mighty apt to starve. Geordie he haint never going to run out of wheat-flour, let alone corn meal. Gee! if you could see the things he's got in that locked box of his!"
"What has he?" I asked.
"Oh, I haint never seed 'em,—nobody haint; but any minute in the day he can run his hand in and pull out something a boy'll think he's pine-blank bound to have or die!"
When I heard to-night that Keats's tooth-brush, Jason's blue necktie I gave him, Hen's fine-comb and pencil, Iry's "gallusses," and Nucky's only handkerchief, were among the articles traded for pop-gun material, I was moved to wrath with Geordie; but when he displayed to me the small and apparently worthless things he had accepted from other boys,—a torn woolen comforter from Taulbee, Killis's holey mittens, Joab's worn-out yarn socks, and a handful of rusty horse-shoe nails from Hosea, it seemed to me that, on the whole, there had not been such exorbitant exchanges for the joy of a pop-gun, and I softened my reprimand.
Thursday.
Mrs. Salyer rode in to-day to see her boys, a watermelon in one saddle-pocket, a lot of fine pawpaws in the other. Oh the joy of the "two homesicks"! Before leaving, she said that her cousin Emmeline's funeral occasion was set for the fourth Saturday and Sunday in October, and she hoped her boys might be permitted to come home at that time and pay their respects to Emmeline, adding that she would be pleased to have me come with them. In answer to my puzzled inquiries—for I failed to see how Emmeline's death could be so nicely calculated in advance—she explained that funerals are never held in this country at the time of burial, when it is usually impossible to get a preacher, but that they are conducted in deliberate and appropriate style a year or two after the death.
This is to be the little Salyers' first visit home—we think it best they shall not go until then—and never, I suppose, was a funeral-occasion the subject of such desire and rejoicing.
Sunday Night.
For two weeks we have been reading Hawthorne's Wonder Tales; and this afternoon on our walk the boys, led by Nucky, searched hopefully in caves, coal-banks and rock-dens for gorgons, minotaurs and dragons, finding nothing worse, however, than a few rattlesnakes and copperheads,—a tame substitute and an old story. But the value of drawing their minds to foes in the abstract is already apparent,—they fight less, and traits other than martial are coming to the front. Nucky has been giving his energies to learning, with results that astonish. His teacher says she has never seen such mental alertness. She has already put him up two grades, and says if he keeps on he may go up another this half-term. Iry, too, is proving his right to his title of "pure scholar."
To-night when we began again on the Wonder Book, Nucky said, "I can tell you a story that beats them,—all about a man by the name of Christian, that fit with devils, and come near being et up by a giant ten times as big as him."