turn thrown
over by them, and here I am, in the wilderness, very much pleased."

He lived in the little town of Blue River, and was justice of the peace,
postmaster, storekeeper, and occasionally school-teacher. He was small
in stature, with a tendency to become rotund as he grew older. He took
pride in his dress and was as cleanly as an Englishman. He was
reasonably willing to do the duty that confronted him, and loved but
three forms of recreation,--to be with his two most intimate friends,
Rita and Dic, to wander in the trackless forests, and to play upon his
piano. His piano was his sweetheart, and often in the warm summer
evenings, when his neighbors were in bed, would the strains of his music
lull them to sleep, and float out into the surrounding forests,
awakening the whippoorwill to heart-rending cries of anguish that would
give a man the "blues" for a month. I believe many ignorant persons
thought that Billy was not exactly "right in the top," as they put it,
because he would often wander through the forests, night or day, singing
to himself, talking to the trees and birds, and clasping to his soul
fair nature in her virgin strength and sweetness. He often communed
with himself after this fashion: "I am a fortunate man in the things I
love, for I have them to my heart's content. Rita and Dic are children.
I give them knowledge. They give me youth. I touch my piano. It fills my
soul with peace. If it gives me a discordant note, the fault is mine. I
go to the forest, and sweet Nature takes me in her arms and lulls me to
ecstasy."

Billy Little and I had been college chums, and had emigrated on the same
ship. I studied law, entered the practice, married, and have a family.
While my wife and family did not mar the friendship between Little and
myself, it prevented frequency of intercourse, for a wife and family are
great absorbents. However, he and I remained friends, and from him I
have most of the facts constituting this story.

This friend of Dic's was a great help to the boy intellectually, and at
fourteen or fifteen years of age, when other boys considered their
education complete if they could spell phthisis and Constantinople, our
hero was reading Virgil and Shakespeare, and was learning to think for
himself. The knowledge obtained from Billy Little the boy tried to
impart to Rita. Tom held learning and books to be effeminate and
wasteful of time; but Rita drank in Dic's teaching, with now and then a
help