d downward, and all that. I can do it all."

He looked away from her with mischief in his eyes, and hummed a line
through his fine Greek nose, as Captain Pharo might.

"I don't doubt it, but you were high in the college too--for Lunette
saw it in a paper: so high it was spoken of!"

"I just asked them to do that, Vesty. People can't refuse me, you
know. I get whatever I ask for."

He turned to her with a sort of childish pathos on his strong, handsome
face.

She bit her lip for joy and pride in him, even his strange, gay ways.

"Come, Vesta!" he said, with an air of natural and graceful
proprietorship; "a stolen meeting is nonsense between you and me. I
shall see you home."

II

"SETTIN' ON THE LOG"

His face invited me, the skin drawn over it rather tightly, resembling
a death's-head, yet beaming with immortal joy.

He was sitting on a log; his little granddaughter, on the other side of
him, was as cheerfully diverted in falling off of it. He was picking
his teeth with some mysterious talisman of a bone, selected from the
forepaw of a deer, and gazing at the heavens as at a fond familiar
brother.

"Won't you set down a spa-ll," he said, and the way he said spell
suggested pleasing epochs of rest.

"Leezur's my name; and neow I'll tell ye how ye can all'as remember it;
it's jest like all them great discoveries, it's dreadful easy when it's
once been thought on. Leezur--leezure--see? Leezure means takin'
things moderate, ye know, kind o' settin' areound in the shank o' the
evenin'--Leezur--lee-zure--see!"

Oh, how he beamed! The systems of Newton and Copernicus seemed dwarfed
in comparison. I sat down on the log; the little girl, gazing at me in
astonishment, fell off.

"What's the marter, Dilly?" said her grandfather, in the same slow,
mellow, jubilant tone with which he had propounded his discovery, and
not withdrawing his fond smile from the heavens; "'s the log tew
reoundin' for ye to set stiddy on?"

A rattling brown structure rose before us, surrounded by a somewhat
firm staging; a skeleton roof, with a few shingles in one corner,
twisted all ways by the wind. It told its own tale, of an interrupted
vocation.

"I expect to git afoul of her agin to-morrer," continued Captain
Leezur; "ef Pharo got my nails when he went up to the Point to-day.
Some neow 's all'as dreadful oneasy when they gits to shinglin'; wants
to drive the last shingle deown 'fore the first one's weather-shaped