y shade of a low-growing
jackoak, lazily smoked their pipes, and gazed contentedly out over the
far-spreading camps, in which no man was doing anything more laborious
than gathering a little wood to boil his evening coffee with. "'Tain't
fit to store brick-bats in now. By-and-by we'll go out and hunt up old
Bragg and give him a good punch, and the whole crazy shebang 'll come
down with a crash."

"I only wish old Bragg wasn't of sich a retirin' nature," lazily
commented Shorty. "The shade o' this tree is good enough for me. I don't
want to ever leave it. Why couldn't he've waited for me, and we could've
had it out here, coolly and pleasantly, and settled which was the best
man! The thing' d bin over, and each feller could've gone about his
business."

Both relapsed into silence as each fell into day dreams the one about a
buxom, rosy-cheeked little maiden in the Valley of the Wabash; the
other of one in far-off Wisconsin, whom he had never seen, but whom
he mentally endowed with all the virtues and charms that his warmest
imagination could invest a woman. Neither could see a woman without
thinking how inferior she was in looks, words or acts to those whose
images they carried in their hearts, and she was sure to suffer greatly
by the comparison.

Such is the divinely transforming quality of love.

Each of the boys had taken the first opportunity, after getting enough
to eat, a shelter prepared, and his clothes in shape and a tolerable
rest, to write a long letter to the object of his affections. Shorty's
letter was not long on paper, but in the time it took him to write it.
He felt that he was making some progress with the fair maid of Bad Ax,
and this made him the more deeply anxious that no misstep should thwart
the progress of love's young dream.

Letter-writing presented unusual difficulties to Shorty. His training
in the noble art of penmanship had stopped short long before his sinewy
fingers had acquired much knack at forming the letters. Spelling and
he had a permanent disagreement early in life, and he was scarcely on
speaking terms with grammar. He had never any trouble conveying his
thoughts by means of speech. People had very little difficulty in
understanding what he meant when he talked, but this was quite different
from getting his thoughts down in plain black and white for the reading
of a strange young woman whom he was desperately anxious to please, and
desperately afraid of offending. He labored