certain complaints of abusive punishment, against Master Brench.

The complaints were from numbers of the parents, and concerned putting
those props in pupils' mouths to abolish "buzzing" of the lips, while
studying their lessons; and also complaints about "sitting on nothing,"
said to be injurious to the spine. The affair did not much concern us
young folks at the old Squire's. Indeed, we did not much care for the
school that winter. Master Brench's attention was chiefly directed to
keeping order and devising punishments for violations of school
discipline. School studies appeared to be of minor importance with him.

It was on Tuesday of that week, while we were at home, that the
following incident occurred.

Owing to our long winters, sheep raising, in Maine, has often been an
uncertain business. But at the old Squire's we usually kept a flock of
eighty or a hundred. They often brought us no real profit, but
grandmother Ruth was an old-fashioned housewife who would have felt
herself bereaved if she had had no woolen yarn for socks and bed
blankets.

The sheep were already at the barn for the winter; it was the 12th of
December, though as yet we had had no snow that remained long on the
ground. We were cutting firewood out in the lot that day and came in at
noon with good appetites, for the air was sharp.

While we sat at table a stranger drove up. He said that his name was
Morey, and that he was stocking a farm which he had recently bought in
the town of Lovell, nineteen or twenty miles west of our place.

"I want to buy a flock of sheep," he said. "I have called to see if you
have any to sell."

"Well, perhaps," the old Squire replied, for that was one of the years
when wool was low priced. As he and Morey went out to the west barn
where the sheep were kept, grandmother Ruth looked disturbed.

"You go out and tell your grandfather not to sell those sheep," she said
after a few minutes to Addison and me. "Tell him not to price them."

Addison and I went out, but we arrived too late. Mr. Morey and the old
Squire were standing by the yard bars, looking at the sheep, and as we
came up the stranger said:

"Now, about how much would you take for this flock--you to drive them
over to my place in Lovell?"

Before either Addison or I could pass on grandmother Ruth's admonition,
the old Squire had replied smilingly, "Well, I'd take five dollars a
head for them."

As a matter of fact, the old gentleman had not rea