“My name ain’t Bur, Mr. Guy; my name is Chub, and I don’t like to be called out of my name.  Mother always called me Chub.”

“Well, Chub—­since you like it best, though at best a bur—­what were you doing in that tree?  How dare you spy into my dwelling, and send other people there?  Speak, or I’ll skin you alive!”

“Now, don’t, Mr. Guy!  Don’t, I beg you!  ’Taint right to talk so, and I don’t like it!—­But is that your dwelling, Mr. Guy, in truth?—­you really live in it, all the year round?  Now, you don’t, do you?”

The outlaw had no fierceness when contemplating the object before him.  Strange nature!  He seemed to regard the deformities of mind and body, in the outcast under his eyes, as something kindred.  Was there anything like sympathy in such a feeling? or was it rather that perversity of temper which sometimes seems to cast an ennobling feature over violence, and to afford here and there, a touch of that moral sunshine which can now and then give an almost redeeming expression to the countenance of vice itself?  He contemplated the idiot for a few moments with a close eye, and a mind evidently busied in thought.  Laying his hand, at length, on his shoulder, he was about to speak, when the deformed started back from the touch as if in horror—­a feeling, indeed, fully visible in every feature of his face.

“Now, don’t touch Chub, Mr. Guy!  Mother said you were a dark man, and told me to keep clear of you.  Don’t touch me agin, Mr. Guy; I don’t like it.”

The outlaw, musingly, spoke to his lieutenant:  “And this is education.  Who shall doubt its importance? who shall say that it does not overthrow and altogether destroy the original nature?  The selfish mother of this miserable outcast, fearing that he might be won away from his service to her, taught him to avoid all other persons, and even those who had treated her with kindness were thus described to this poor dependant.  To him the sympathies of others would have been the greatest blessing; yet she so tutored him, that, at her death, he was left desolate.  You hear his account of me, gathered, as he says, and as I doubt not, from her own lips.  That account is true, so far as my other relationships with mankind are concerned; but not true as regards my connection with her.  I furnished that old creature with food when she was starving, and when this boy, sick and impotent, could do little for her service.  I never uttered a harsh word in her ears, or treated her unkindly; yet this is the character she gives of me—­and this, indeed, the character which she has given of all others.  A feeling of the narrowest selfishness has led her deliberately to misrepresent all mankind, and has been productive of a more ungracious result, in driving one from his species, who, more than any other, stands in need of their sympathy and association.”

While Rivers spoke thus, the idiot listened with an air of the most stupid attention.  His head fell on one shoulder, and one hand partially sustained it.  As the former concluded his remarks, Chub recovered a posture as nearly erect as possible, and remarked, with as much significance as could comport with his general expression—­