step the ground
rose as high as his knees before him, and then when he got his foot high
enough, and began to put it down, the ground was not there. He was
deathly sick, as he reeled and staggered on, and when he reached home,
and showed himself white and haggard to his frightened mother, he had
scarcely strength to gasp out a confession of his attempt to retrieve
the family honor by learning to chew tobacco. In another moment nature
came to his relief, and then he fell into a deep sleep which lasted the
whole afternoon, so that it seemed to him the next day when he woke up,
glad to find himself alive, if not so very lively. Perhaps he had
swallowed some of the poisonous juice of the tobacco; perhaps it had
acted upon his brain without that. His father made no very close inquiry
into the facts, and he did not forbid him the use of tobacco. It was not
necessary; in that one little experiment he had got enough for a whole
lifetime. It shows that, after all, a boy is not so hard to satisfy in
everything.

There were some people who believed that tobacco would keep off the
fever-and-ague, which was so common then in that country, or at any rate
that it was good for the toothache. In spite of the tobacco, there were
few houses where ague was not a familiar guest, however unwelcome. If
the family was large, there was usually a chill every day; one had it
one day, and another the next, so that there was no lapse. This was the
case in my boy's family, after they moved to the Faulkner house, which
was near the Basin and its water-soaked banks; but they accepted the
ague as something quite in the course of nature, and duly broke it up
with quinine. Some of the boys had chills at school; and sometimes,
after they had been in swimming, they would wait round on the bank till
a fellow had his chill out, and then they would all go off together and
forget about it. The next day that fellow would be as well as any one;
the third day his chill would come on again, but he did not allow it to
interfere with his business or pleasure, and after a while the ague
would seem to get tired of it, and give up altogether. That strange
earth-spirit who was my boy's friend simply beat the ague, as it were,
on its own ground. He preferred a sunny spot to have his chill in, a
cosy fence-corner or a warm back door-step, or the like; but as for the
fever that followed the chill, he took no account of it whatever, or at
least made no provision for it.