of him and setting him up to
tricks. He just lives round at the stores and the post-office. And what
Tom Scott don't know ain't worth knowing. Came home with six jack-knives
in his pockets the first day Jenny turned him out in pantaloons. The boys
tried themselves to see who could do best by him. You could hear them
shouting and laughing all over the town at the things they got him to
say. I tell you he's a case, Tom is. Last election he was as stirred up
as any of us. Hollered ''Rah for Collins' until he was hoarse and his
mother brought him home and gave him syrup of squills because she thought
he had the croup. What do you think he did, now? Went into Barton's store
and ordered a bushel of chestnuts to be sent down to my account and
brought 'em out and set on the horse-block and gave a treat for Collins.
I was coming up home and saw the crowd and heard the hollering and
laughing, and there was Tom in the middle baling out his chestnuts and
hollering at the top of his voice: 'Come on, boys, all you Collins men,
here's a treat for Collins!' I thought Collins would have died when he
heard it. He laughed until he choked, and the next day he came to see Tom
and gave him a gold eagle and a colt. He says he is going to give him a
little nigger to look after it, and he'll do it. Oh, Tom Scott's the boy!
He'll be in the White House forty years from now. He's making a bee-line
for it right now."

And he bent and kissed the little fellow's sunburnt rosy cheek.

"His mother and his grandmother can't do a thing with him," he said,
rapturously, "and it's as much as I can do to manage him. Oh, he's a
case, is Tom Scott!"

And with this tribute to his character, he left him to his slumbers, with
his sturdy little legs occupying an extensive area of crib and his face
resting on his small brown arm.

After this, the Judge went to his supper and consumed a large quantity of
fried chicken, waffles, and coffee, afterwards joining Tom on the porch,
smoking his pipe and stigmatising Thatcher in a loud and jovial voice as
the meanest man in Hamlin.

But for this resonant jovialness of voice, his denunciation of the
Democratic Party, which was not his party, might have appeared rather
startling.

"There isn't an honest man among them," he announced. "Not a durned one!
They're all the same. Cut each other's throats for a dime, the whole
caboodle. Oh! damn a Democrat anyhow, Tom, 'tain't in the nature of
things that they should be anyth