“Go ahead,” said the Doctor, “I’ll take a quarter as my share of the story, and you may cut it off of either end, or carve it out of the middle.  I’ll take a quarter, tough or tender.”

“You may set down a quarter to my account,” said Smith, “and Spalding shall take another.”  “Very well, then,” said Martin, “I’ll believe a quarter of it myself, and so the case is made up, as the judge would say.”

“Well,” repeated Martin, “you know MARE Shuff?” “Of course I know Mark Shuff; and who, that has visited these lakes and woods don’t know him?  He is a stalwart man, six feet in his stockings, strong, healthy, and enduring as iron, I have had him as a boatman and guide about Tupper’s Lake, and the regions beyond it, more than once.  He works at lumbering in the winter, and if there is one among the hundreds, I had almost said thousands, who make war, in the snowy season of the year, upon the old pines of the Rackett woods, who can swing an axe more effectually than Mark Shuff, his light is under a bushel—­his fame obscured.  Mark works hard for four or five months, and lays around loose the balance of the year.  In the summer, he holds a cost as a thing of ornament rather than use, and boots or shoes as luxuries, not to be reckoned as among the necessaries of life.  His hat, as a general thing, is of straw, and minus a little more than half the brim.  He would be out of place, and out of uniform, as well as out of temper with himself, if he was for any considerable length of time without the stub of a marvelously black pipe in his mouth, filled with plug tobacco, shaved and rubbed in his hand into a proper condition for smoking.  Mark, though by no means an intemperate man, is fond of a drop now and then, and when he has just a thimbleful too much, the way he will swear is emphatically a sin.  And yet he is anything but quarrelsome or contrary, even when a shade over the line of strict sobriety.  He is a great, strong, square-shouldered, big-breasted, good-natured specimen of the genus homo, a giant in physical strength, and were I a wolf, I would prefer letting him alone to any man in these parts.  When he gets just the least grain “shiny” (and he never gets beyond that), and his oar goes a little wrong, or a twig brushes him ungently, or his seat gets a little hard, he will express his sense of its improper deportment by incontinently damning its eyes, and so forth, as if it were a sentient thing, and understood all his profane denunciations; but with all this, Mark never forgets to be respectful, and, in his way, courteous to his employers.  He has, moreover, a sharp, clear eye in his head, and can see a deer, or any other game, as quick, and shoot it as far as the best, and has as good a knowledge of where they are to be found, as any man in these woods.”