proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and not
getting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there were
grape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity,
with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was a
fellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and he
liked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever as
he was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows want
to go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boy
one night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night with
his boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmare
and walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before
he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his
chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and
so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest
slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had
to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and
gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only
because the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole family
was.

It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went with
before that boy who knew about _Monte Cristo_ came to learn the trade in
their father's office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole
day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts
on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be
sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard
thrown open for building-lots behind my boy's yard; but they could not
find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of
putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of
green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went
up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the
barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold,
and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the
points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple
almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as
you could see him.

On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was
not there, and in the afternoon they heard h