father became impatient at my brother for taking so long to find the switch; and so was I, for I wanted to have the thing over and done with.  At last, in came David, a picture of open-hearted innocence, solemnly dragging a young bur-oak sapling, and handed the end of it to father, saying it was the best switch he could find.  It was an awfully heavy one, about two and a half inches thick at the butt and ten feet long, almost big enough for a fence-pole.  There wasn’t room enough in the cabin to swing it, and the moment I saw it I burst out laughing in the midst of my fears.  But father failed to see the fun and was very angry at David, heaved the bur-oak outside and passionately demanded his reason for fetching “sic a muckle rail like that instead o’ a switch?  Do ye ca’ that a switch?  I have a gude mind to thrash you insteed o’ John.”  David, with demure, downcast eyes, looked preternaturally righteous, but as usual prudently answered never a word.

It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way they should go; and poor overworked father was determined to do it if enough of the right kind of switches could be found.  But this time, as the sun was getting high, he hitched up old Tom and Jerry and made haste to the Kingston lumber-yard, leaving me unscathed and as innocently wicked as ever; for hardly had father got fairly out of sight among the oaks and hickories, ere all our troubles, hell-threatenings, and exhortations were forgotten in the fun we had lassoing a stubborn old sow and laboriously trying to teach her to go reasonably steady in rope harness.  She was the first hog that father bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful beast.  In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer, funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more.  They were so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive little squeals to lie down and give them a drink.

After her darling short-snouted babies were about a month old, she took them out to the woods and gradually roamed farther and farther from the shanty in search of acorns and roots.  One afternoon we heard a rifle-shot, a very noticeable thing, as we had no near neighbors, as yet.  We thought it must have been fired by an Indian on the trail that followed the right bank of the Fox River between Portage and Packwaukee Lake and passed our shanty at a distance of about three quarters of a mile.  Just a few minutes after that shot was heard, along came the poor mother rushing up to the shanty for protection, with her pigs, all out of breath and terror-stricken.  One of them was missing, and we supposed of course that an Indian had shot it for food.  Next day, I discovered a blood-puddle where the Indian trail crossed the outlet of our lake.  One of father’s hired men told us that the Indians thought nothing of levying this sort of blackmail whenever they were hungry.  The solemn awe and fear in the eyes of that old mother and those little pigs I never can forget; it was as unmistakable and deadly a fear as I ever saw expressed by any human eye, and corroborates in no uncertain way the oneness of all of us.