“Now you’re talkin’!  Couldn’t make out what you was a-tryin’ to git through yo’ head no way.  B’long to a church!  Why, boss, he’s ben the pizenest kind of Free-will Babtis’ for forty year.  They ain’t no pizener ones ’n what he is.  Mighty good man, pap is.  Everybody says that.  If they said any diffrunt they wouldn’t say it whar I wuz —­not much they wouldn’t.”

“What is your own religion?”

“Well, boss, you’ve kind o’ got me, there—­and yit you hain’t got me so mighty much, nuther.  I think ’t if a feller he’ps another feller when he’s in trouble, and don’t cuss, and don’t do no mean things, nur noth’n’ he ain’ no business to do, and don’t spell the Saviour’s name with a little g, he ain’t runnin’ no resks—­he’s about as saift as he b’longed to a church.”

“But suppose he did spell it with a little g—­what then?”

“Well, if he done it a-purpose, I reckon he wouldn’t stand no chance—­he oughtn’t to have no chance, anyway, I’m most rotten certain ’bout that.”

“What is your name?”

“Nicodemus Dodge.”

“I think maybe you’ll do, Nicodemus.  We’ll give you a trial, anyway.”

“All right.”

“When would you like to begin?”

“Now.”

So, within ten minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat off and hard at it.

Beyond that end of our establishment which was furthest from the street, was a deserted garden, pathless, and thickly grown with the bloomy and villainous “jimpson” weed and its common friend the stately sunflower.  In the midst of this mournful spot was a decayed and aged little “frame” house with but one room, one window, and no ceiling—­it had been a smoke-house a generation before.  Nicodemus was given this lonely and ghostly den as a bedchamber.

The village smarties recognized a treasure in Nicodemus, right away—­a butt to play jokes on.  It was easy to see that he was inconceivably green and confiding.  George Jones had the glory of perpetrating the first joke on him; he gave him a cigar with a firecracker in it and winked to the crowd to come; the thing exploded presently and swept away the bulk of Nicodemus’s eyebrows and eyelashes.  He simply said: 

“I consider them kind of seeg’yars dangersome,”—­and seemed to suspect nothing.  The next evening Nicodemus waylaid George and poured a bucket of ice-water over him.

One day, while Nicodemus was in swimming, Tom McElroy “tied” his clothes.  Nicodemus made a bonfire of Tom’s by way of retaliation.

A third joke was played upon Nicodemus a day or two later—­he walked up the middle aisle of the village church, Sunday night, with a staring handbill pinned between his shoulders.  The joker spent the remainder of the night, after church, in the cellar of a deserted house, and Nicodemus sat on the cellar door till toward breakfast-time to make sure that the prisoner remembered that if any noise was made, some rough treatment would be the consequence.  The cellar had two feet of stagnant water in it, and was bottomed with six inches of soft mud.