fire of Tom's by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later--he
walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night,
with a staring hand-bill pinned between his shoulders. The joker
spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a
deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till towards
breakfast-time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if
any noise was made some rough treatment would be the consequence.
The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed
with six inches of soft mud.

But I wander from the point. It was the subject of skeletons that
brought this boy back to my recollection. Before a very long time
had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable
consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of
their attempts on the simpleton from "old Shelby." Experimenters
grew scarce and chary. Now the young doctor came to the rescue.
There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus
to death, and explained how he was going to do it. He had a noble
new skeleton--the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity,
Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard--a grisly piece of property which
he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars,
under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tanyard a
fortnight before his death. The fifty dollars had gone promptly for
whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in
the skeleton. The doctor would put Jimmy Finn's skeleton in
Nicodemus's bed!

This was done--about half-past ten in the evening. About Nicodemus's
usual bedtime--midnight--the village jokers came creeping stealthily
through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers towards the lonely frame
den. They reached the window and peeped in. There sat the long-legged
pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was
dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music
of "Camptown Races" out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing
against his mouth; by him lay a new jews-harp, a new top, a solid
india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of
"store" candy, and a well-knawed slab of gingerbread as big and as
thick as a volume of sheet music. He had sold the skeleton to a
travelling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result!

[Illustration: "WHEEZING THE MUSIC OF 'CAMPTOWN RACES'"]