,
till the owl twisted its head off in watching him. So round and round
he went for an hour, and stopped only by having the conviction forced
upon his mind that the owl had a swivel in its neck."

"Strange," remarked Spalding, "how the hearing of one story reminds us
of another. I always admired the 'Arabian Nights,' because the stories
contained in that work hang together so like a string of onions, or a
braid of seed corn. The first is a sort of introduction to the second,
and the second an usher to the third, and so on through the whole. But
why the story of the Dutchman and the owl should remind me of another,
in which an old negro and a bellicose ram were the actors, is a matter
I do not pretend to understand, unless it be the extreme absurdity of
both. A gentleman of my acquaintance long ago (he was a middle-aged
man when I was a small boy. He was an upright and a good man. He has
gone to his rest, and sleeps in an honored grave, having upon the
simple stone above him no lying epitaph), had an old negro who
rejoiced in the name of Pompey, and a Merino buck, the latter a
valiant animal, that was ready to fight with anybody, or anything,
that crossed his path. Between him and the 'colored person,' was an
'eternal distinction,' an active and irreconcilable antagonism, that
developed itself on every possible occasion. The old Guinea man was
winnowing wheat one day, with an old-fashioned fan (did any of you
ever see one of these primitive machines for separating wheat from the
chaff, used by our fathers before the fanning mill was invented? It
was an ingenious contrivance, by which a man with a strong back and
of a strong constitution, could clean some twenty bushels in a single
day). While stooping over to fill his fan with unwinnowed grain, the
buck, taking advantage of his position, came like a catapult against
him, and sent him like a ball from a Paixhan gun, head foremost into
the chaff. Great was the astonishment, but greater the wrath of
Pompey, and dire the vengeance that he denounced against his
assailant. Gathering himself up, and rubbing the part battered by the
attack of his enemy, he retreated around the corner of the barn, and
procuring a rock weighing some twenty pounds, returned to the presence
of his foe, who was quietly eating the wheat that the negro had been
cleaning, evidently regarding it as the legitimate spoils of victory.
Getting down on all fours, and managing to hold the stone against his
he