“What is your name?”

“Nicodemus Dodge.”

“I think maybe you’ll do, Nicodemus.  We’ll give you a trial, anyway.”

“All right.”

“When would you like to begin?”

“Now.”

So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.

Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous “jimpson” weed and its common friend the stately sunflower.  In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged little “frame” house with but one room, one window, and no ceiling—­it had been a smoke-house a generation before.  Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.

The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus, right away—­a butt to play jokes on.  It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green and confiding.  George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him; he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept away the bulk of Nicodemus’s eyebrows and eyelashes.  He simply said: 

“I consider them kind of seeg’yars dangersome,”—­and seemed to suspect nothing.  The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.

One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy “tied” his clothes.  Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom’s by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later—­he walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders.  The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made, some rough treatment would be the consequence.  The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.

But I wander from the point.  It was the subject of skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection.  Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of their attempts on the simpleton from “old Shelby.”  Experimenters grew scarce and chary.  Now the young doctor came to the rescue.  There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.  He had a noble new skeleton—­the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard—­a grisly piece of property which he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tan-yard a fortnight before his death.  The fifty dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.  The doctor would put Jimmy Finn’s skeleton in Nicodemus’s bed!