“And now I believe I must be going.  I hear Bill a-whistling.  Maybe he’s got something else to tell me.”

The Smith boy will be profitable to the youth of the community.

* * * * *

Barnes, the pedagogue, is a worthy man who has seen trouble.  Precisely what was the nature of the afflictions which had filled his face with furrows and given him the air of one who has been overburdened with sorrows was not revealed until Mr. Keyser told the story one evening at the grocery-store.  Whether his narrative is strictly true or not is uncertain.  There is a bare possibility that Mr. Keyser may have exaggerated grossly a very simple fact.

“Nobody ever knew how it got in there,” said Mr. Keyser, clasping his hands over his knee and spitting into the stove.  “Some thought Barnes must’ve swallowed a tadpole while drinking out of a spring and it subsequently grew inside him, while others allowed that maybe he’d accidentally eaten frogs’ eggs some time and they’d hatched out.  But anyway, he had that frog down there inside of him settled and permanent and perfectly satisfied with being in out of the rain.  It used to worry Barnes more’n a little, and he tried various things to git rid of it.  The doctors they give him sickening stuff, and over and over agin emptied him; and then they’d hold him by the heels and shake him over a basin, and they’d bait a hook with a fly and fish down his throat hour after hour, but that frog was too intelligent.  He never even gave them a nibble; and when they’d try to fetch him with an emetic, he’d dig his claws into Barnes’s membranes and hold on until the storm was over.

“Not that Barnes minded the frog merely being in there if he’d only a kept quiet.  But he was too vociferous—­that’s what Barnes said to me.  A taciturn frog he wouldn’t have cared about so much.  But how would you like to have one down inside of you there a-whooping every now and then in the most ridiculous manner?  Maybe, for instance, Barnes’d be out taking tea with a friend, and just when everybody else was quiet it’d suddenly occur to his frog to tune-up, and the next minute you’d hear something go ‘Blo-o-o-ood-a-noun!  Blo-oo-oo-ood-a-noun!’ two or three times, apparently under the table.  Then the folks would ask if there was an aquarium in the house or if the man had a frog-pond in the cellar, and Barnes’d get as red as fire and jump up and go home.

“And often when he’d be setting in church, perhaps in the most solemn part of the sermon, he’d feel something give two or three quick kinder jerks under his vest, and presently that reptile would bawl right out in the meeting ‘Bloo-oo-oo-ood-a-noun!  Bloo-oo-oo-ood-a-nou-ou-oun!’ and keep it up until the sexton would come along and run out two or three boys for profaning the sanctuary.  And at last he’d fix it on poor old Barnes, and then tell him that if he wanted to practice ventriloquism he’d better wait till after church.  And then the frog’d give six or seven more hollers, so that the minister would stop and look at Barnes, and Barnes’d get up and skip down the aisle and go home furious about it.