ir or foul weather.

Mindy Toggs's head, with its thick thatch of light hair reaching to
his shoulders, had the pent effect of some monstrous mushroom cap
over his meagre body, with its loosely hung limbs, which moved
constantly with uncouth sprawls and flings, as if by some terrible
machinery of diseased nerves. Poor Mindy Toggs's great thatched head
also nodded and lopped unceasingly, and his slobbering chin dipped
into his calico shirt-bosom, and he said over and over, in his
strange voice like a parrot's, the only two words he was ever known
to speak, "Simon Basset, Simon Basset."

Mindy Toggs was sixty years old, it was said. His past was as dim as
his intellect. Nobody seemed to know exactly when Mindy Toggs was
born, or just when he had come to the poorhouse. Nobody knew who
either of his parents had been. Nobody knew how he got his name, but
there was a belief that it had a folk-lore-like origin; that
generations of Overseers ago an enterprising wife of one had striven
to set his feeble wits to account in minding the pauper babies, and
gradually, through transmission by weak and childish minds, his task
had become his name. Toggs was held to be merely a reminiscence of
some particularly ludicrous stage of his poorhouse costume.

Mindy Toggs had dwelt in the poorhouse ever since people could
remember, with the exception of one year, when he was boarded out by
the town with Simon Basset, and learned to speak his two words. Simon
Basset had always had an opinion that work could be gotten out of
Mindy Toggs. Nobody ever knew by what means he set himself to prove
it; there had been dark stories; but one day Simon brought Mindy back
to the poorhouse, declaring with a strange emphasis that he never
wanted to set eyes on the blasted fool again, and Mindy had learned
his two words.

It was said that the sight of Simon Basset roused the idiot to
terrific paroxysms of rage and fear, and that Basset never
encountered him if he could help it. However, poor Mindy was harmless
enough to ordinary folk, sitting day after day in the barn door,
looking out through the dusty shafts of sunlight, through spraying
mists of rain, and often through the white weave of snow, repeating
his two words, which had been dinned into his feeble brain, the Lord
only knew by what cruelty and terror--"Simon Basset, Simon Basset."

Mindy Toggs was a terrifying object to nervous little Elmira Edwards,
but Jerome used often to bid her run along,