and
at the little boy beside him, his bare feet dangling high above the floor
of the battered buckboard, overcome with the responsibility of driving a
horse for the first time in his life, and filled with such a flood of new
emotions and ideas that he must have been quite pale."

Professor Mallory leaned back and laughed aloud at the vision he had been
evoking--laughed with so joyous a relish in his reminiscences that the
drawn, impatient face of his listener relaxed a little. He drew a long
breath, he even smiled a little absently.

"Oh, that was a day!" went on the professor, still laughing and wiping his
eyes. "Never will I have such another! At the entrance to the grounds
gran'ther stopped me while he solemnly untied the knot in his empty
sleeve. I don't know what kind of hairbrained vow he had tied up in it,
but with the little ceremony disappeared every trace of restraint, and we
plunged head over ears into the saturnalia of delights that was an
old-time county fair.

"People had little cash in those days, and gran'ther's six dollars and
forty-three cents lasted like the widow's cruse of oil. We went to see the
fat lady, who, if she was really as big as she looked to me then, must
have weighed at least a ton. My admiration for gran'ther's daredevil
qualities rose to infinity when he entered into free-and-easy talk with
her, about how much she ate, and could she raise her arms enough to do up
her own hair, and how many yards of velvet it took to make her gorgeous,
gold-trimmed robe. She laughed a great deal at us, but she was evidently
touched by his human interest, for she confided to him that it was not
velvet at all, but furniture covering; and when we went away she pressed
on us a bag of peanuts. She said she had more peanuts than she could
eat--a state of unbridled opulence which fitted in for me with all the
other superlatives of that day.

"We saw the dog-faced boy, whom we did not like at all; gran'ther
expressing, with a candidly outspoken cynicism, his belief that 'them
whiskers was glued to him.' We wandered about the stock exhibit, gazing at
the monstrous oxen, and hanging over the railings where the prize pigs
lived to scratch their backs. In order to miss nothing, we even
conscientiously passed through the Woman's Building, where we were very
much bored by the serried ranks of preserve jars.

"'Sufferin' Hezekiah!' cried gran'ther irritably 'Who cares how gooseberry
jel _looks_. If they'd give a