show how stout he was. Then,
when he married Elmira Appleton, he had to go to work practising that
perfession reg'lar, because he never learnt nothing about farming. He'd
sell fifteen or twenty acres, every now and then, and they'd be high
times till he'd spent it up, and mebby Elmira would get some new
clothes.

But when I was found on the door step, the land was all gone, and Hank
was practising reg'lar, when not busy cussing out the fellers that had
bought the land. Fur some smart fellers had come along, and bought up
all that swamp land and dreened it, and now it was worth seventy or
eighty dollars an acre. Hank, he figgered some one had cheated him.
Which the Walterses could of dreened theirn too, only they'd ruther
hunt ducks and have fish frys than to dig ditches. All of which I hearn
Elmira talking over with the neighbours more'n once when I was growing
up, and they all says: "How sad it is you have came to this, Elmira!"
And then she'd kind o' spunk up and say, thanks to glory, she'd kep' her
pride.

Well, they was worse places to live in than that there little town, even
if they wasn't no railroad within eight miles, and only three hundred
soles in the hull copperation. Which Hank's shop and our house set in
the edge of the woods jest outside the copperation line, so's the city
marshal didn't have no authority to arrest him after he crossed it.

They was one thing in that house I always admired when I was a kid. And
that was a big cistern. Most people has their cisterns outside their
house, and they is a tin pipe takes all the rain water off the roof and
scoots it into them. Ourn worked the same, but our cistern was right in
under our kitchen floor, and they was a trap door with leather hinges
opened into it right by the kitchen stove. But that wasn't why I was
so proud of it. It was because that cistern was jest plumb full of
fish--bullheads and red horse and sunfish and other kinds.

Hank's father had built that cistern. And one time he brung home some
live fish in a bucket and dumped em in there. And they growed. And they
multiplied in there and refurnished the earth. So that cistern had got
to be a fambly custom, which was kep' up in that fambly for a habit.
It was a great comfort to Hank, fur all them Walterses was great fish
eaters, though it never went to brains. We fed em now and then, and
throwed back in the little ones till they was growed, and kep' the dead
ones picked out soon's we smelled anyt