at the dog. The pointer
dog that stays under the wagon never comes to a point on chickens, and
the duck dog that stays on the shore and waits for the dead duck to
drift in, is not worth the dog biscuit he eats.

"No, boy, whatever you do in this world, don't drift around, but row as
though you were going after the doctor," and the old man turned from the
window and put his arm around the red-headed boy, and hugged him until
he heard something rattle in the boy's side pocket, and the boy pulled
out a box with the cover off, and a white powder scattered over his
clothes. "What is that powder?" asked the old uncle.

"That is some of this foot-ease that I saw advertised in the paper. Aunt
Almira likes pigs' feet, and she says they lay hard on her stomach; so
I got some foot-ease and sprinkled a little on her pigs' feet for lunch,
and she ate it all right. Say, don't you think it is nice to be trying
to do kind acts for your auntie?"

"Yes; but if she ever finds out about that pigs' foot ease, she will
make you think your trousers are warmer than your hair. You strike me as
being a boy that resembles a tornado. No one knows when you are going
to become dangerous, or where you are going to strike. You and a tornado
are a good deal like a cross-eyed man; you don't strike where you look
as though you were aiming, and suddenly you strike where you are not
looking, and where nobody is looking for you to strike. Nature must have
been in a curious mood when she produced cross-eyed men, red-headed boys
and tornadoes. What do you think ought to be done to Nature for giving
me a redheaded boy to bring up, eh, you rascal?" and the old man chucked
the boy under the chin, as though he wasn't half as mad at Nature as he
pretended to be.

"Uncle Ike, do you think a tornado could be broken up, when it got all
ready to tear a town to pieces, by shooting into it with a cannon, as
the scientific people say?" said the boy, climbing up into the old
man's lap, and slyly putting a handful of peanut shucks down under the
waistband of his uncle's trousers.

"Well, I don't know," said Uncle Ike, as he wiggled around a little
when the first peanut shuck got down near the small of his back. "These
scientific people make me weary, talking about preventing tornadoes by
firing cannon into the funnel-shaped clouds. Why don't they do it? If
a tornado came up, you would find these cannon sharps in a cellar
somewhere. They are a passel of condemned theo