I had a brother a good deal older than myself, who was as fond of a joke as I was of the rabbits, and who was quite as ready to make game of me, as I was of them; so he told me, one day to put an apple on a stick over their paths, high enough to be just above their reach, and a handful of Scotch snuff on a dry leaf on the ground under it, and the rabbits, while smelling for the apple, would inhale the snuff, and sneeze themselves to death in no tune.  Well, I was a child then and simple enough to be gammoned by this rigmarole.  I set the apple and the snuff, but I got no rabbit, while I did get laughed at hugely for my credulity.  This satisfied me that people should never impose upon the simplicity of childhood.  I remember my mortification on the occasion.  It was so long ago that it stands out by itself, a mere fragment of memory, with all beyond it a blank, and a wide gap out this side.  It is an isolated fact, fixed in my recollection by the pain it occasioned me.”

“Your anecdote of the rabbits,” said the Doctor, “reminds me of a story told of a Dutchman, who discovered an owl on a limb above him, and noticed that its face, and great round eyes, followed him always as he walked around the tree, without its body moving at all.  Seeing this he concluded in his wisdom, that he would travel round the tree, 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