boy himself that was able to
talk and tell his anxious parents to forget all about it. His father
took the message and as soon as he got the sense of it he begun to get
hopeful that the kid had broke at least one leg--thinking, he must have
been, of the matched pacing stallions that once did himself such a good
turn without meaning to. His disappointment was pitiful as he turned to
us after learning that he had lit on his head but only sustained a few
bruises and sprains and concussions, with the wall-paper scraped off
here and there.

"'Struck on his head, the only part of him that seems invulnerable,'
says the fond father. 'What's that?' he yells, for the boy was talking
again. He listened a minute, and it was right entertaining to watch his
face work as the words come along. It registered all the evil that
Scotland has suffered from her oppressors since they first thought up
the name for it. Finally he begun to splutter back--it must have sounded
fine at the other end--but he had to hang up, he was that emotional.
After he got his face human again he says to us:

"'Would either of you think now that you could guess at what might have
been his dying speech? Would you guess it might be words of cheer to the
bereaved mother that nursed him, or even a word of comfort to the idiot
father that never touched whipleather to his back while he was still
husky enough to get by with it? Well, you'd guess wild. He's but
inflamed with indignation over the state of the road where he passed out
for some minutes. He says it's a disgrace to any civilized community,
and he means to make trouble about it with the county supervisor, who
must be a murderer at heart, and then he'll take it up to the supreme
court and see if we can't have roads in this country as good as
Napoleon the First made them build in France, so a gentleman can speed
up a bit over five miles an hour without breaking every bone in his
body, to say nothing of totally ruining a car costing forty-eight
hundred dollars of his good money, with the ink on the check for it
scarce dry. He was going on to say that he had the race for the crossing
as good as won and had just waved mockingly at the engineer of the
defeated train who was pretending to feel indifferent about it--but I
hung up on him. My strength was waning. Was he here this minute I make
no doubt I'd go to the mat with him, unequal as we are in prowess.' He
dribbled off into vicious mutterings of what he'd say to