And by George he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he ’lowed to take his time, now.  It was always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted.  He moved back to Indiany pretty soon—­went to Wellsville —­Wellsville was the place the Hogadorns was from.  Mighty fine family.  Old Maryland stock.  Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see.  His second wife was the widder Billings—­she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon Dunlap’s first wife.  Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace—­et up by the savages.  They et him, too, poor feller —­biled him.  It warn’t the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his’n that went down there to bring away his things, that they’d tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of ’em—­and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man’s life was fooled away just out of a dern’d experiment, so to speak.  But mind you, there ain’t anything ever reely lost; everything that people can’t understand and don’t see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys.  That there missionary’s substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu’ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue.  Nothing ever fetched them but that.  Don’t tell me it was an accident that he was biled.  There ain’t no such a thing as an accident.

’When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man’s back in two places.  People said it was an accident.  Much accident there was about that.  He didn’t know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object.  If he hadn’t been there the Irishman would have been killed.  Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that.  Uncle Lem’s dog was there.  Why didn’t the Irishman fall on the dog?  Becuz the dog would a seen him a coming and stood from under.  That’s the reason the dog warn’t appinted.  A dog can’t be depended on to carry out a special providence.  Mark my words it was a put-up thing.  Accidents don’t happen, boys.  Uncle Lem’s dog—­I wish you could a seen that dog.  He was a reglar shepherd—­or ruther he was part bull and part shepherd—­splendid animal; belonged to parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him.  Parson Hagar belonged to the Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to ’tend the funeral.  There was fourteen yards in the piece.