ing more serious than peach-down on his lip;
yet there was gravity enough in his composition to carry him beneath the
mere surface of men and things. The Kid drove in one night with rifle
tall as himself, fishing-tackle, and entomological truck, wild with
enthusiasm and hungry as a carp.

What days followed! Our little entomologist chased scarlet-winged
dragon-flies and descanted on the myriad forms of insect-life with
premature accomplishment. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" we
heard revelations not unmixed with the ludicrous superstitions of the
nursery.

There is a school-house a mile distant, on the forks of the creek; we
visited it one Friday, and saw six angular youths, the sum total of the
young ideas within range of the instructress, spelled down in
broadsides; and heard time-honored recitations delivered in the same old
sing-song that could only have been original with the sons of our first
parents. The school-mistress, with a sun-bonnet that buried her face
from the world, passed Ingram's ten times a week, footing it silently
along the dusty road, lunch-pail in hand. She lives in a lonely cabin on
the trail to the wilderness over the hill.

The Kid sketched a little; indeed, the artistic fever spread to the
granary, where the boys spent some hours of each day restoring, not to
say improving, the tarnished color of certain face-cards of an imperfect
euchre deck, the refuse of the palette being carefully secreted to this
end; we never knew at what moment we might sit upon the improvised
color-box of some juvenile member of the family.

But hunting was our delectable recreation; the Doctor would lead off on
a half-broken _bronco_, followed by a select few from the house or the
friendly camps, Fred bringing up the rear with a pack-mule. This was the
chief joy of the hounds; the old couple grew young at the scent of the
trail, and deserted their whining progeny with Indian stoicism. Two
nights and a day were enough for a single hunt,--one may in that time
scour the rocky fortresses of the Last Chance, or scale the formidable
slopes of the Devil's Ribs.

The return from the hunt was a scene of picturesque interest: the
approach of the hunters at dusk, as they emerged one after another from
the dark wood; the pack-mule prancing proudly under a stark buck
weighing one hundred and thirty-three pounds, without its vitals; the
baby fawn slain by chance (for no one would acknowledge the criminal
slaughter