h to admit it
to himself, to find some one in the room more awkward than himself.
Nothing is a better boon, when embarrassed, than to see some one there a
bigger dolt than yourself.

Limber Tim would come in, but he would not sit down. He would go over
against the wall and stand there on one leg, with his hands stuck in
behind him and his head lolled to one side while his mouth fell open,
with his back glued up against the wall, as if he was a sort of statuary
that had made up its mind never to fall down on its face.

He would stand in that attitude till the Widow would speak to him or
even smile on him, and then he would flop right over with his face to
the wall, whip out a great pencil from his canvas pocket, and then
slowly begin to scrawl the date, or as near as he could guess it, and
sketch grotesque pictures all over the new hewn logs of the cabin.

The Widow used to call that place the Almanac, for Limber Tim knew the
date and day of the year, if any man in the Forks knew it. Though it
sometimes happened that when the pack-train with the provisions would
come in from the outer world they would find they were two, three and
even four days behind or ahead in their calculations.

At last Sandy began to get tired of Limber Tim on the wall at the
Widow's. Perhaps he was in the way. At all events he "shook" him, as
they called it at the Howling Wilderness, and "played it alone."

One evening Sandy had a sorry tale to tell the little woman. She
listened as never she had listened before. Poor Little Billie, young
Piper the boy poet, the boy who was always so alone, was down with a
fever, and was wild and talking in strange ways, and they had no help,
no doctor, nothing. "Yes, yes," cried Sandy, "the Forks is a doin' its
level best. Watchin' and a watchin', but he won't git up ag'in. It's
all up with poor Billie."

And all the Forks was doing its best too. But the boy was very ill. The
Forks was good: and it was also very sorry, for it had laughed at this
young man with hands white and small and a waist like a woman's, and now
that he was dying it wanted to be forgiven.

It was something to the Forks that it had allowed this boy to bear his
own Christian name; the only example of the kind on its records.

The Widow was not very talkative after that, and Sandy went away earlier
than usual. He thought to drop in and see the boy; but turned aside and
called at the Howling Wilderness. In a few minutes he went back to