They waited all that day for the waters to subside, and Katy taught the Poet several new culinary arts, while he showed her his traps and hunting gear, and initiated the two strangers into all the mysteries of mink and muskrat catching, telling them more about the habits of fur-bearing animals than they could have learned from books.  And Charlton recited many pieces of “real dictionary poetry” to the poor fellow, who was at last prevailed on to read some of his dialect pieces in the presence of Katy.  He read her one on “What the Sunflower said to the Hollyhock,” and a love-poem, called “Polly in the Spring-house.”  The first strophe of this inartistic idyl will doubtless be all the reader will care to see.

    POLLY IN THE SPRING-HOUSE.

  Purtier’n dressed-up gals in town
  Is peart and larfin’ Polly Brown,
  With curly hair a-hangin’ down,
An’ sleeves rolled clean above her elbow. 
  Barfeooted stan’in on the rocks,
  A-pourin’ milk in airthen crocks,
  An’ kiverin’ ’em with clean white blocks—­
  Jest lis’en how my fool heart knocks—­
Shet up, my heart! what makes you tell so?

“You see,” he said, blushing and stammering, “you see, miss, I had a sort of a preju_dice_ agin town gals in them air days, I thought they was all stuck up and proud like; I didn’ think the—­the—­well—­you know I don’t mean no harm nur nothin’—­but I didn’ expect the very purtiest on ’em all was ever agoin’ to come into my shanty and make herself at home like as ef I was a eddicated gentleman.  All I said agin town gals I take back.  I—­I—­you see—­” but finding it impossible to get through, the Poet remembered something to be attended to out of doors.

The ever active Charlton could not pass a day in idleness.  By ten o’clock he had selected a claim and staked it out.  It was just the place for his great school.  When the country should have settled up, he would found a farm-school here and make a great institution out of it.  The Inhabitant was delighted with the prospect of having the brother of an angel for a neighbor, and readily made a bargain to erect for Charlton a cabin like his own for purposes of pre-emption.  Albert’s lively imagination had already planned the building and grounds of his institution.

During the whole of that sunshiny day that Charlton waited for the waters of Pleasant Brook to subside, George Gray, the Inhabitant of the lone cabin, exhausted his ingenuity in endeavoring to make his hospitality as complete as possible.  When Albert saw him standing by the ladder in the morning, he had already shot some prairie-chickens, which he carefully broiled.  And after they had supped on wild strawberries and another night had passed, they breakfasted on some squirrels killed in a neighboring grove, and made into a delicious stew by the use of such vegetables as the garden of the Inhabitant afforded.  Charlton and the Poet got the horse and buggy through the stream.