With the natural ingenuousness of childhood I closed one eye, my boy, and says I:
"Do you mean to tell me, old man, that he was struck by lightning, and yet wasn't hurt?"
"Yes," says the venerable chap, abstractedly cutting a small log from the door-frame of the grocery store with his jack-knife; "the streak passed off from him, because he was a conductor."
"A conductor?" says I, picking up another stone to throw at the same dog.
"Yes," says the chap confidentially, "he was a conductor—on a railroad."
The human mind, my boy, when long affected by country air, tends naturally to the marvellous, and affiliates with the German in normal transcendentalism.
Such was the house in which I came to life a certain number of years ago, entering the world, like a human exclamation point, between two of the angriest sentences of a September storm, and adding materially to the uproar prevailing at the time.
Next to my parents, of whom I shall say little at present, the person I can best remember, as I look back, was our family physician. A very obese man was he, my boy, with certain sweet-oiliness of manner, and never out of patients. I think I can see him still, as he arose from his chair after a profound study of the case before him, and wrote a prescription so circumlocutory in its effect, that it sent a servant half a mile to his friend, the druggist, for articles she might have found in her own kitchen, aqua pumpaginis and sugar being the sole ingredients required.
The doctor had started business in our village as a veterinary surgeon, my boy; but, as the entire extent of his practice for six months in that line was a call to mend one of Colt's revolvers, he finally turned his attention to the ailings of his fellows, and wrought many cures with sugar and water Latinized.
At first, my father did not patronize the new doctor, having very little faith in the efficacy of sugar and water without the addition of a certain other composite often seen in bottles; but the doctor's neat speech at a Sunday school festival won his heart at last. The festival was held near a series of small waterfalls just out of the village, my boy, and the doctor, who was an invited guest, was called upon for a few appropriate remarks. In compliance with the demand he made a speech of some compass, ending with a peroration that is still quoted in my native place. He pointed impressively to the waterfalls, and says he: