This was done—­about half past ten in the evening.  About Nicodemus’s usual bedtime—­midnight—­the village jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.  They reached the window and peeped in.  There sat the long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music of “Camptown Races” out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of “store” candy, and a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.  He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside.  We saw men and women standing away up there looking frightened, and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down the steep slope toward us.  We got out of the way, and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.  He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him to do but trust to luck and take what might come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is no stopping till the bottom is reached.  Think of people farming on a slant which is so steep that the best you can say of it—­if you want to be fastidiously accurate—­is, that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite so steep as a mansard roof.  But that is what they do.  Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg were stood up “edgeways.”  The boy was wonderfully jolted up, and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone, and by that time the men and women had scampered down and brought his cap.

Men, women, and children flocked out from neighboring cottages and joined the crowd; the pale boy was petted, and stared at, and commiserated, and water was brought for him to drink and bathe his bruises in.  And such another clatter of tongues!  All who had seen the catastrophe were describing it at once, and each trying to talk louder than his neighbor; and one youth of a superior genius ran a little way up the hill, called attention, tripped, fell, rolled down among us, and thus triumphantly showed exactly how the thing had been done.

Harris and I were included in all the descriptions; how we were coming along; how Hans Gross shouted; how we looked up startled; how we saw Peter coming like a cannon-shot; how judiciously we got out of the way, and let him come; and with what presence of mind we picked him up and brushed him off and set him on a rock when the performance was over.  We were as much heroes as anybody else, except Peter, and were so recognized; we were taken with Peter and the populace to Peter’s mother’s cottage, and there we ate bread and cheese, and drank milk and beer with everybody, and had a most sociable good time; and when we left we had a handshake all around, and were receiving and shouting back Leb’ WOHL’s until a turn in the road separated us from our cordial and kindly new friends forever.