t the boy was out of sight. In fact, he was just
around the corner, laughing as if he would split. He had seen his
pursuer's discomfiture, and regarded it as a huge practical joke.

"I never had such fun in all my life," he ejaculated, with difficulty,
and he went off into a fresh convulsion. "The old feller won't forget
me in a hurry."

CHAPTER II.

SAM'S EARLY LIFE.

Three years before the meeting described in the previous chapter Sam
Barker became an orphan, by the death of his father. The father was an
intemperate man, and no one grieved much for his death. Sam felt
rather relieved than otherwise. He had received many a beating from
his father, in his fits of drunken fury, and had been obliged to
forage for himself for the most part, getting a meal from one
neighbor, a basket of provision from another, and so managed to eke
out a precarious subsistence in the tumble-down shanty which he and
his father occupied.

Mr. Barker left no will, for the good and sufficient reason that he
had no property to dispose of. So, on the day after the funeral, Sam
found himself a candidate for the poorhouse. He was a stout boy of
twelve, strong and sturdy in spite of insufficient food, and certainly
had suffered nothing from luxurious living.

It was a country town in Connecticut, near the Rhode Island border. We
will call it Dudley. The selectmen deliberated what should be done
with Sam.

"There isn't much for a lad like him to do at the poorhouse," said
Major Stebbins. "He'd ought to be set to work. Why don't you take him,
Deacon Hopkins?"

"I do need a boy," said the deacon, "but I'm most afeard to take Sam.
He's a dreadful mischievous boy, I've heerd."

"He's had a bad example in his father," said the major. "You could
train him up the way he'd ought to go."

"Mebbe I could," said the deacon, flattered by this tribute, and
reflecting, moreover, that he could get a good deal of work out of Sam
without being obliged to pay him wages.

"You could train him up to be a respectable man," said the major.
"They wouldn't know what to do with him at the poorhouse."

So the deacon was prevailed upon to take Sam to bring up.

"You're goin to live with me, Samuel," said the deacon, calling the
boy to his side.

"Am I?" asked Sam, surveying the old man attentively.

"Yes; I shall try to make a man of you."

"I'll get to be a man anyway, if I live long enough," said Sam.

"I mean I will make a man of you in a moral