The feller took the money and started away; and when he was going out at the door, he sorter jerked his thumb over his shoulder—­this way—­at Dan’l, and says again, very deliberate, “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”

Smiley he stood scratching his head and looking down at Dan’l a long time, and at last he says, “I do wonder what in the nation that frog throwed off for—­I wonder if there ain’t something the matter with him—­he ’pears to look mighty baggy, somehow.”  And he ketched Dan’l by the nap of his neck, and lifted him up and says, “Why, blame my cats, if he don’t weigh five pounds!” and turned him upside down, and he belched out a double handful of shot.  And then he see how it was and he was the maddest man—­he set the frog down and took out after that feller, but he never ketched him.  And—­

(Here Simon Wheeler heard his name called from the front yard, and got up to see what was wanted.) And, turning to me as he moved away, he said:  “Just set where you are, stranger, and rest easy—­I ain’t going to be gone a second.”

But, by your leave, I did not think that a continuation of the history of the enterprising vagabond Jim Smiley would be likely to afford me much information concerning the Rev. Leonidas W. Smiley, and so I started away.

At the door I met the social Wheeler returning, and he buttonholed me and recommenced: 

“Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yaller one-eyed cow that didn’t have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and—­”

“Oh! hang Smiley and his afflicted cow!” I muttered good-naturedly, and, bidding the old gentleman good-day, I departed.

THE CHARMING FRENCHMAN

BOSSUET
[Sidenote:  Sainte-Beuve]

As for the happiness itself, of which he would give us a just idea, the purely spiritual and internal happiness of the soul in the other life, he sums it up in an expression which concludes a happy development of the subject, and he defines it:  Reason always attentive and always contented.  Take reason in its liveliest and most luminous sense, the pure flame disengaged from the senses.

ROUSSEAU
[Sidenote:  Sainte-Beuve]

It is from him that the sentiment of nature is reckoned among us, in the eighteenth century.  It is from him also that is dated, in our literature, the sentiment of domestic life; of that homely, poor, quiet, hidden life, in which are accumulated so many treasures of virtue and affection.  Amid certain details, in bad taste, in which he speaks of robbery and of eatables, how one pardons him on account of that old song of childhood, of which he knows only the air and some words stitched together, but which he always wished to recover, and which he never recalls, old as he is, without a soothing charm!

JOUBERT
[Sidenote:  Sainte-Beuve]