andered from the immediate
vicinity of the school-house, where he appeared to be waiting for the
children to come out to play. Often have I looked up to see him gazing in
at the windows with a gleam of evil expectancy in his melancholy dun
brown eye.

With the joyful advent of the spring came, also, Tommy's tame owl and
"Happy Moses." Tommy's owl emerged from his winter-quarters, and took up
his daily post of observation on the fence on the shady side of the
school-house. He was blind in one eye, which eye was always open, the
other was always closed. Yet with that one glassy, unblinking orb,
Tommy's owl seemed to me, as I lifted my eyes to the window, to be
reviewing the past with an indifference as calm and all-embracing as that
with which he sent his inexorable gaze into the future; and to take in me
and the passing events of the school-room as a mere speck in his
kaleidoscopic vision of the ages.

What was the winter's thraldom from which Happy Moses had escaped, I
never learned. He was a broad-shouldered fellow, six feet in height, with
a beard like flax, and a sunny, ingenuous countenance. What term should
have been applied to his eccentricities in politer circles I cannot say,
but in Wallencamp, he was artlessly designated as "the fool." Whether it
was on this account, that with a certain rashness of perception peculiar
to the Wallencampers, they always prefixed the adjective "happy" to his
name, or merely on account of the transparent sunniness of his
disposition, I cannot say, either.

Happy Moses played with the children. He regarded me, as one of the class
of those who presume to teach, with mingled scorn and aversion. When I
went to the door to blow the children in from their play, he invariably
turned his back upon me, cocked his hat on one side of his head, and
walked away with an air that was palpably reckless, defiant, and jaunty.

When he reappeared, it was usually with his knitting-work, to which he
devoted himself in a desultory way, reclining on the school-house steps.
But sometimes he sat on the fence with the owl, and then it was
noticeable that while the gaze of the one was transient and silly, the
gaze of the other seemed to grow the more unutterably searching and
profound. So, at last, the new term was fairly established with these
three--Dr. Aberdeen, Happy Moses, and the owl.

Hulled corn and beans had now become but as a dream of the past in
Wallencamp, and for a brief season before the