n the throne. So
surprised was the topmost Spissimen that he was as quiet for a moment
as the one underneath him, staring about, blinking. Then, looking down
at Mac's punch-cup, he remembered his grievance, and took up the wail
where he had left it off.

"Nuh, nuh! don't you do that," said the Boy with startling suddenness.
"If you make that noise, I'll have to make a worse one. If you cry,
Kaviak, I'll have to sing. Hmt, hmt! don't you do it." And as Kaviak,
in spite of instructions, began to bawl, the Boy began to do a
plantation jig, crooning monotonously:

"'Grashoppah sett'n on de swee' p'tater vine,
Swee' p'tater vine, swee' p'tater vine;
Grasshoppah--'"

He stopped as suddenly as he'd begun. "_Now_, will you be good?"

Kaviak drew a breath with a catch in it, looked round, and began as
firmly as ever:

"Weh!--eh!--eh!"

"Sh--sh!" The Boy clapped his hands, and lugubriously intoned:

"'Dey's de badger and de bah,
En de funny lil hah,
En de active lil flea,
En de lil armadillah
Dat sleeps widouter pillah,
An dey all gottah mate but me--ee--ee!'

"Farva!" Kaviak gasped.

"Say, do a nigger breakdown," solicited Potts.

"Ain't room; besides, I can't do it with blisters."

They did the impossible--they made room, and turned back the
buffalo-skin. Only the big Colonel, who was most in the way of all,
sat, not stirring, staring in the fire. Such a look on the absent,
tender face as the great masters, the divinest poets cannot often
summon, but which comes at the call of some foolish old nursery jingle,
some fragment of half-forgotten folk-lore, heard when the world was
young--when all hearing was music, when all sight was "pictures," when
every sense brought marvels that seemed the everyday way of the
wonderful, wonderful world.

For an obvious reason it is not through the utterances of the greatest
that the child receives his first intimations of the beauty and the
mystery of things. These come in lowly guise with familiar everyday
voices, but their eloquence has the incommunicable grace of infancy,
the promise of the first dawn, the menace of the first night.

"Do you remember the thing about the screech-owl and the weather
signs?" said the Colonel, roused at last by the jig on his toes and the
rattle of improvised "bones" almost in his face.

"Reckon I do, honey," said the Boy, his feet still flying and flapping
on the hard earthen floor.

"_'Wen de screech-owl light on de g