as like the fellow who took a piece of iron to the shop,
intending to make him an ax. After working for some time and failing,
he concluded he would make him a wedge, and, failing in this, said,
"I'll make a skeow." So he heats the iron red-hot and drops it into the
slack-tub, and it went s-k-e-o-w, bubble, bubble, s-k-e-o-w, bust.

KILLING A YANKEE SCOUT

On the night of the 20th, the Yankees were on Peachtree creek, advancing
toward Atlanta. I was a videt that night, on the outpost of the army.
I could plainly hear the moving of their army, even the talking and
laughing of the Federal soldiers. I was standing in an old sedge field.
About midnight everything quieted down. I was alone in the darkness,
left to watch while the army slept. The pale moon was on the wane,
a little yellow arc, emitting but a dim light, and the clouds were lazily
passing over it, while the stars seemed trying to wink and sparkle and
make night beautiful. I thought of God, of heaven, of home, and I
thought of Jennie--her whom I had ever loved, and who had given me her
troth in all of her maiden purity, to be my darling bride so soon as the
war was over. I thought of the scenes of my childhood, my school-boy
days. I thought of the time when I left peace and home, for war and
privations. I had Jennie's picture in my pocket Bible, alongside of a
braid of her beautiful hair. And I thought of how good, how pure,
and how beautiful was the woman, who, if I lived, would share my hopes
and struggles, my happiness as well as troubles, and who would be my
darling bride, and happiness would ever be mine. An owl had lit on an
old tree near me and began to "hoo, hoo, hoo are you," and his mate would
answer back from the lugubrious depths of the Chattahoochee swamps.
A shivering owl also sat on the limb of a tree and kept up its dismal
wailings. And ever now and then I could hear the tingle, tingle, tingle
of a cow bell in the distance, and the shrill cry of the whip-poor-will.
The shivering owl and whip-poor-will seemed to be in a sort of talk,
and the jack-o'-lanterns seemed to be playing spirits--when, hush! what
is that? listen! It might have been two o'clock, and I saw, or thought I
saw, the dim outlines of a Yankee soldier, lying on the ground not more
than ten steps from where I stood. I tried to imagine it was a stump
or hallucination of the imagination. I looked at it again. The more I
looked the more it assumed the outlines of a m