y's Pond or
puddles of that ilk--"been in swimming again, have you? In the river,
I'll be bound."

Two little boys, my brother and I would choke out some sort of a
mumbling evasion in lieu of a reply.

"How did you get your hair wet?" the old man would continue, rising and
feeling two guilty little heads.

"Per-perspiration, sir," we would gasp out faintly.

"And that vile odor about you? Hey? Is that perspiration, too?"
sniffing the air with a grim resolution that made our hearts sink.

We had been smoking drift-wood, the vilest stuff that anybody can put
in his mouth. This was enough to betray us.

"It's no use, boys; you needn't say another word," father would add in
the face of our desperate and awful {325} attempts at an adequate
explanation. "You know what I told you. Go to the wood-shed!"

Oh, that wood-shed! "Abandon ye all hope who enter here" should have
been written over its door. Often mother would interfere--bless her
tender heart!--but not always. Father was a small man of sedentary
habits, not given to athletic exercises. A board across two barrels
afforded a convenient resting-place for the arms and breast of the one
appointed to receive the corporal punishment, and a barrel stave was an
excellent instrument with which to administer it. I said father was a
small, weak man. When he got through with us we used to think he would
have made a splendid blacksmith. Our muscles were pretty strong, and
our skin callous--"the hand of little use hath the daintier
touch!"--but they were as nothing to his. We always tired of that game
before he did, although we played it often.

Two of us, I recall, have carried large tubs up the steep bank from the
river to the train at 4 A. M. on a summer morning, when the circus came
to town. We were proud to be privileged to water the elephants, but it
killed us to split wood for a day's burning in the kitchen stove. We
never were good for anything except assisting the circus people, on
circus day. School was torture, and it was generally dismissed.

Our father was mayor of the town, and the mayor's children usually got
in free. On one occasion we yielded to the solicitations of our most
intimate friends and assembled thirty of them in a body. This group of
children of all ages and sizes--and there was even one lone "nigger" in
it--we were to pass through the gate by declaring that we were the
mayor's children.

"Great heavens!" cried the ticket man