mebody with
sho' 'nough skin an' bones, an'--n' I wants to hear 'bout Uncle Piljerk
Peter."

"I will tell you a Bible story," again suggested his aunt, "I will tell
you about--"

"I don' want to hear no Bible story, neither," he objected, "I wants to
hear Uncle Jimmy-Jawed Jup'ter play his 'corjun an' sing:

"'Rabbit up the gum tree, Coon is in the holler
Wake, snake; Juney-Bug stole a half a dollar."'

"I'll sing you a hymn," said Miss Minerva patiently.

"I don' want to hear you sing no hymn," said Billy impolitely. "I wants
to see Sanctified Sophy shout."

As his aunt could think of no substitute with which to tempt him in lieu
of Sanctified Sophy's shouting, she remained silent.

"An' I wants Wilkes Booth Lincoln to dance a clog," persisted her
nephew.

Miss Minerva still remained silent. She felt unable to cope with the
situation till she had adjusted her thoughts and made her plans.

Presently Billy, looking at her shrewdly, said:

"Gimme my rabbit foot, Aunt Minerva, an' I'll go right off to sleep."

When she again looked in on him he was fast asleep, a rosy flush on his
babyish, tearstained cheek, his red lips half parted, his curly head
pillowed on his arm, and close against his soft, young throat there
nestled the left hind foot of a rabbit.

Miss Minerva's bed time was half after nine o'clock, summer or winter.
She had hardly varied a second in the years that had elapsed since the
runaway marriage of her only relative, the young sister whose child
had now come to live with her. But on the night of Billy's arrival the
stern, narrow woman sat for hours in her rocking chair, her mind busy
with thoughts of that pretty young sister, dead since the boy's birth.

And now the wild, reckless, dissipated brother-in-law was dead, too, and
the child had been sent to her; to the aunt who did not want him,
who did not care for children, who had never forgiven her sister her
unfortunate marriage. "If he had only been a girl," she sighed. What she
believed to be a happy thought entered her brain.

"I shall rear him," she promised herself, "just as if he were a little
girl; then he will be both a pleasure and a comfort to me, and a
companion for my loneliness."

Miss Minerva was strictly methodical; she worked ever by the clock,
so many hours for this, so many minutes for that. William, she now
resolved, for the first time becoming really interested in him, should
grow up to be a model young man, a sple