n: "That was old Milligan that just went
out--beware of him. He will load you up with truck about himself. He
rings in his sermons; trots around with church social notices that ought
to be paid for, and tries to get them in free; likes to be referred to
as doctor; slips in mean items about his congregation, if you don't
watch him; and insists on talking religion Saturday morning when you are
too busy to spit. More than that, he has an awful breath--cut him out;
he will make life a burden if you don't--and if you do he will go to the
old man with it, and say you are not treating him right."

[Illustration: Reverend Milligan came in with a church notice]

There was a rattling and a scratching on the wire partition between
Jimmy and the door. Jimmy looked up from his work and saw the sprightly
little figure of Parson Milligan coming over the railing like a monkey.
He had not gone out of the door--a printer had come in when it opened
and shut. And then Jimmy took his last flying trip out of the back door
of the office, down the alley, "toward the sunset's purple rim." It was
not his fault. He was only telling the truth--where it would do the most
good.

XII

"'A Babbled of Green Fields"

Our town is set upon a hillside, rising from a prairie stream. Forty
years ago the stream ran through a thick woodland nearly a mile wide,
and in the woodland were stately elms, spreading walnut trees, shapely
oaks, gaunt white sycamores, and straight, bushy hackberries, that shook
their fruit upon the ice in spots least frequented by skaters. Along the
draws that emptied into the stream were pawpaw trees, with their tender
foliage, and their soft wood, which little boys delighted to cut for
stick horses. Beneath all these trees grew a dense underbrush of
buckeyes, blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and little red winter
berries called Indian beads by the children. Wild grapevines, "poison"
grapes, and ivies of both kinds wove the woods into a mass of summer
green. In the clearings and bordering the wood grew the sumach, that
flared red at the very thought of Jack Frost's coming. In these woods
the boys of our town--many of whom have been dead these twenty
years--used to lay their traps for the monsters of the forest, and
trudged back from the timber before breakfast, in winter, bringing home
redbirds, and rabbits and squirrels. Sometimes a particularly doughty
woodsman would report that there were wildcat tracks about hi