er, I'd starve to death the first
week. But Geordie he's cut out for it."

"I'm afraid I don't see the connection between trading and preaching," I
said.

"Well, preachers can't take no money for preaching--it would be a
sin--and they haint got much time for tending craps and such, and less'n
they good traders they mighty apt to starve. Geordie he haint never
going to run out of wheat-flour, let alone corn meal. Gee! if you could
see the things he's got in that locked box of his!"

"What has he?" I asked.

"Oh, _I_ haint never seed 'em,--nobody haint; but any minute in the day
he can run his hand in and pull out something a boy'll think he's
pine-blank bound to have or die!"

When I heard to-night that Keats's tooth-brush, Jason's blue necktie I
gave him, Hen's fine-comb and pencil, Iry's "gallusses," and Nucky's
only handkerchief, were among the articles traded for pop-gun material,
I was moved to wrath with Geordie; but when he displayed to me the small
and apparently worthless things he had accepted from other boys,--a torn
woolen comforter from Taulbee, Killis's holey mittens, Joab's worn-out
yarn socks, and a handful of rusty horse-shoe nails from Hosea, it
seemed to me that, on the whole, there had not been such exorbitant
exchanges for the joy of a pop-gun, and I softened my reprimand.

_Thursday._

Mrs. Salyer rode in to-day to see her boys, a watermelon in one
saddle-pocket, a lot of fine pawpaws in the other. Oh the joy of the
"two homesicks"! Before leaving, she said that her cousin Emmeline's
funeral occasion was set for the fourth Saturday and Sunday in October,
and she hoped her boys might be permitted to come home at that time and
pay their respects to Emmeline, adding that she would be pleased to
have me come with them. In answer to my puzzled inquiries--for I failed
to see how Emmeline's death could be so nicely calculated in
advance--she explained that funerals are never held in this country at
the time of burial, when it is usually impossible to get a preacher, but
that they are conducted in deliberate and appropriate style a year or
two after the death.

This is to be the little Salyers' first visit home--we think it best
they shall not go until then--and never, I suppose, was a
funeral-occasion the subject of such desire and rejoicing.

_Sunday Night._

For two weeks we have been reading Hawthorne's Wonder Tales; and this
afternoon on our walk the boys, led by Nucky, searc