logs, but his own gifts lay elsewhere. He approved of my gun and would
have spent whole days firing it into the sky or the tree-tops, or at the
barn or at birds, or into an expansive random, to the general danger of
the neighborhood, if I had let him. He had a taste for jewelry,
especially for my scarf-pins. When he saw one loosely lying about he
carefully laid it away to prevent accident, using a very private little
box he had, as a proper and safe place for it. When he discussed this
matter he told me quite casually that he spected something _would_
happen to him some day, as his father and uncle, and I think he said his
grandfather, were at the moment in the penitentiary. He was inclined to
exaggerate and may have been boasting, but I think his ancestry was of
that turn.

Lazarus's own chief treasure was a clock. I do not recall now where he
said it came from, but he valued it highly. It was a round tin clock,
with an alarm attachment. He kept it by his bed, and the alarm was his
especial joy. He loved the sound of it, I do not know why. Perhaps it
echoed some shrill, raucous cry of the jungle that had stirred his
ancestors, and something hereditary in him still answered to it. He
never seemed to realize that it was attached to the clock for any
special purpose, such as rousing him to the affairs of the day. To him
it was music, inspiration, even solace. When its strident concatenation
of sounds smote the morning air Lazarus would let it rave on
interminably, probably hugging himself with the fierce joy of it,
lulled by its final notes to a relapse of dreams. It did not on any
occasion stimulate him to rise and dress. That was a more strenuous
matter--one requiring at times physical encouragement on my part. Had
his bulk been in proportion to his trance, I should have needed a block
and tackle and a derrick to raise this later Lazarus.

Lazarus's downfall was a matter of pigs. We did not expect to embark in
pig culture when we settled at Brook Ridge, but Westbury encouraged the
notion, and our faith in Westbury was strong. He said that pigs had a
passion for dish-water and garbage, and that our kitchen surplus,
modestly supplemented with "shorts," would maintain a side-line of two
pigs, which would grow into three-hundred-pounders and fill up Uncle
Joe's pork and ham barrels by the end of another season.

The idea was alluring. A neighbor had small pigs for sale, and I ordered
a pair. There was an old pen near the