"I'd ruther see a railroad-train as to eat!" declared Geordie, and this
appeared to be the prevailing sentiment, except with Keats, who said
dismally that he didn't crave to see anything that would take him fifty
mile' from Nervesty and home. After reflection, Hen agreed with him.

"Listen at them two homesicks!" remarked Philip, cuttingly.

Geordie folded his fat hands. "Now you might tell about your paw gettin'
kilt," he said.

Killis said that the officers had been spying around on his "paw" a long
time for "stilling" liquor, but that he was too smart for them, and
moved the still about, and made liquor by night, and also frightened
them by sending word to the marshal he would never be taken alive. That
one night they had just "drug" the still up to a new place in the
hollow, and he and his father and uncles were sitting around the fire,
when there was a yell, and the marshal and a deputy burst in, shooting
as they came. That his uncles returned the fire, but before his father
could do so, he fell, with a dreadful wound through the stomach. That he
himself, when he saw his father fall, snatched a hunting-knife and cut
the marshal in the forearm with it as he was running out.

The last item he told without bragging, and quite as a matter of course.
The other boys gave him looks of approval and envy, all save Nucky. "By
Heck, I wouldn't have stopped with his arm," he declared.

"I haint," replied Killis, quietly.

Evidently I have two heroes on my hands!

_Saturday Night._

Moses and Zachariah, two more runaways, were returned this morning, and
this afternoon arrived my twelfth boy,--the last, since they cannot
sleep more than three in a bed! Jason is a beautiful child of seven,
very funny in his little long trousers. I wanted him at sight, but
hesitated on account of his youth. When I heard from his father,
however, that he had no mother now, I took him at once. Before leaving,
Mr. Wyatt said that Jason was right pyeert about learning, and, he added
candidly, about meanness too, and he hoped I would not spar' the rod.
The rod indeed,--I threw a protecting arm around the angelic-looking
child at the word.

Indeed, not a few of the parents have warned me against wild and warlike
tendencies in their offspring,--Mr. Marrs, for instance, said that Nucky
was a master scholar when he could leave off fighting long enough to
study his books, and others have admonished me to hold a tight rein.
Their warnings a