by the straw-stack, and as there was a yellow streak on his black face, concluded he had learned his lesson about the hen’s nest altogether too well.  He was given a hoe and taken to the corn-field at once.  Here Daniel showed him just how to cut out the weeds with the hoe and loosen the earth about the roots of the corn.  Zeb nodded and grinned so cheerfully that, after watching him a few moments, Daniel called Nancy and they started for Gran’ther Wattles’s house in the village to get the puppy.  They had gone but a short distance when Nancy, glancing around, saw Zeb following them, grinning from ear to ear.

“No—­no—­no—­go back,” bawled Daniel, pointing to the corn-field.  Zeb nodded with the utmost intelligence and followed right along.  “Oh, dear!” groaned Daniel.  “I ’ve taught him to do things by showing how, and now he thinks he must do everything that I do.”

[Illustration]

He sat down on a stone and gazed despairingly at Zeb.  Zeb promptly sat down on another stone and beamed at him!  In vain Daniel pointed and shouted, and shook his head.  Zeb nodded as cheerfully as ever and conscientiously imitated Dan’s every move.  In spite of all they could do he followed them clear to Gran’ther Wattles’s house.

“Oh, dear!” said Nancy, “it ’s just like having your shadow come to life!  You ’ll have to work all the time, Dan, or Zeb won’t work at all!”

Even with the wonderful new puppy in his arms Dan took a gloomy view of the situation.  “I ’m sick of being an example,” he said.  “I had to be one at Aunt Bradford’s all the time, for she told Mercy and Joseph to watch how I behaved, and now here ’s this crazy blackamoor mocking everything I do!  I guess Father ’ll wish he had n’t bought him.”

The days that followed were trying ones for everybody.  The Goodwife was nearly distracted trying to house her family and do her work in such crowded quarters.  Zeb followed Dan like a nightmare, and the Goodman delved early and late to catch up with the work which had waited for his return.  Among other duties there were berries to be picked in the pasture and dried for winter use, and this task fell to the children.  It was work which Zeb thoroughly enjoyed, but alas, he ate more than he brought home.  On one occasion he ate green fruit along with the ripe, and spent a noisy night afterward holding on to his stomach and howling at each new pain.  In vain the Goodwife tried to cure him with a dose of hot pepper tea.  Zeb took just enough to burn his mouth and, finding the cure worse than the disease, roared more industriously than ever.  She was at her wit’s end and finally had to leave him to groan it out alone beside the fire.  It was weeks before he learned to understand the simplest sentences, and meanwhile poor Dan had to go on being an example.