“I wish father’d buy me a dog, so’s I could send him up that way.  But I never have any luck.  Bill said that where they used to live he went out on the roof one day to fly his kite, and he sat on top of the chimbly to give her plenty of room, and while he was sitting there thinking about nothing, the old man put a keg of powder down below in the fire-place to clean the soot out of the chimbly.  And when he touched her off, Bill was blowed over agin the Baptist church steeple, and he landed on the weather-cock with his pants torn, and they couldn’t git him down for three days, so he hung there, going round and round with the wind, and he lived by eating the crows that came and sat on him, because they thought he was made of sheet-iron and put up there on purpose.

“He’s had more fun than enough.  He was telling me the other day about a sausage-stuffer his brother invented.  It was a kinder machine that worked with a treadle; and Bill said the way they did in the fall was to fix it on the hog’s back, and connect the treadle with a string, and then the hog’d work the treadle and keep on running it up and down until the machine cut the hog all up fine and shoved the meat into the skins.  Bill said his brother called it ‘Every Hog His Own Stuffer,’ and it worked splendid.  But I do’ know.  ’Pears to me ’sif there couldn’t be no machine like that.  But anyway, Bill said so.

“And he told me about an uncle of his out in Australia who was et by a big oyster once; and when, he got inside, he stayed there until he’d et the oyster.  Then he split the shell open and took half a one for a boat, and he sailed along until he met a sea-serpent, and he killed it and drawed off its skin, and when he got home he sold it to an engine company for a hose, for forty thousand dollars, to put out fires with.  Bill said that was actually so, because he could show me a man who used to belong to the engine company.  I wish father’d let me go out to find a sea-serpent like that; but he don’t let me have a chance to distinguish myself.

“Bill was saying only yesterday that the Indians caught him once and drove eleven railroad spikes through his stomach and cut off his scalp, and it never hurt him a bit.  He said he got away by the daughter of the chief sneaking him out of the wigwam and lending him a horse.  Bill says she was in love with him; and when I asked him to let me see the holes where they drove in the spikes, he said he daresn’t take off his clothes or he’d bleed to death.  He said his own father didn’t know it, because Bill was afraid it might worry the old man.

“And Bill tole me they wasn’t going to get him to go to Sunday-school.  He says his father has a brass idol that he keeps in the garret, and Bill says he’s made up his mind to be a pagan, and to begin to go naked, and carry a tomahawk and a bow and arrow, as soon as the warm weather comes.  And to prove it to me, he says his father has this town all underlaid with nitro-glycerine, and as soon as he gets ready he’s going to blow the old thing out, and bust her up, let her rip, and demolish her.  He said so down at the dam, and tole me not to tell anybody, but I thought they’d be no harm in mentioning it to you.