“Come back, Fernando; mother is afraid you will step on a snake.”

He looked about him with the confidence of childhood, and answered: 

“No ’nakes here.”

Just at that moment, the mother, to her horror, saw a deadly reptile coiled in the very path along which the child was rolling his “bushee,” and with true frontier woman’s pluck, ran and snatched up the bare-footed Fernando, when only within two feet of the deadly serpent, carried him to the house, and with the stout staff assailed and killed the rattlesnake.

He remembered seeing the wild deer bound past the cabin door, and one day his father killed one.  The big dog called “Bob,” on account of the shortness of his caudal appendage, on another occasion leaped on a wild buck as he was passing the house, and seized the animal, holding it until it was slain.  Wild turkeys were common; he saw them in great flocks in the woods, and did not suppose they could ever become extinct.

Fernando never forgot his first pair of shoes.  He had grown to be quite a lad, and his bare feet had trod the paths in the forest, and over the prairies in summer and late in autumn, until they had become hardened.  In winter his mother had made him moccasins out of deer skins; but he was at last informed that he was going to have a pair of shoes, such as he had seen some children from the eastern States wear.  His joy at this intelligence knew no bounds.  He dreamed of those shoes at night, and they formed the theme of his conversation by day.  His sister, who was the oldest of the children, had been the happy possessor of three pairs of shoes, and she often discussed knowingly the good qualities of pedal coverings and of their advantages in travelling through brambles or over stones.  Often as he contemplated his scratched, chapped and bruised feet, the child had asked himself if it were possible that he should ever be able to afford such a luxury as a real pair of shoes.

Money was scarce, luxuries scarcer.  The frontier people lived hard, worked hard, slept sound, and enjoyed excellent health.

Though little Fernando had never owned a real pair of shoes in his life, so far as he could remember, he possessed a strong mind and body, and no prince was his superior.  He had, as yet, never been to school a day, but from the great book of nature he had imbibed sublimity and loftiness of thought, which only painters and poets feel.

Though he was shoeless, he was inspired with lofty ideas of freedom such as many reared in cities never dream about.  The father had to make a long journey to some far-away place for the shoes.  The day before starting all the children were made to put their feet on the floor, while the parents measured them with strings, and tied knots to indicate the size of shoes to be purchased.  At last the measures were obtained, and the father put them in the pocket of his buckskin hunting jacket.  Then he harnessed