But I wander from the point.  It was the subject of skeletons that brought this boy back to my recollection.  Before a very long time had elapsed, the village smarties began to feel an uncomfortable consciousness of not having made a very shining success out of their attempts on the simpleton from “old Shelby.”  Experimenters grew scarce and chary.  Now the young doctor came to the rescue.  There was delight and applause when he proposed to scare Nicodemus to death, and explained how he was going to do it.  He had a noble new skeleton—­the skeleton of the late and only local celebrity, Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard—­a grisly piece of property which he had bought of Jimmy Finn himself, at auction, for fifty dollars, under great competition, when Jimmy lay very sick in the tan-yard a fortnight before his death.  The fifty dollars had gone promptly for whiskey and had considerably hurried up the change of ownership in the skeleton.  The doctor would put Jimmy Finn’s skeleton in Nicodemus’s bed!

This was done—­about half past ten in the evening.  About Nicodemus’s usual bedtime—­midnight—­the village jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.  They reached the window and peeped in.  There sat the long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music of “Camptown Races” out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of “store” candy, and a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.  He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result!

Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside.  We saw men and women standing away up there looking frightened, and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down the steep slope toward us.  We got out of the way, and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.  He had tripped and fallen, and there was nothing for him to do but trust to luck and take what might come.

When one starts to roll down a place like that, there is no stopping till the bottom is reached.  Think of people Farming on a slant which is so steep that the best you can say of it—­if you want to be fastidiously accurate—­is, that it is a little steeper than a ladder and not quite so steep as a mansard roof.  But that is what they do.  Some of the little farms on the hillside opposite Heidelberg were stood up “edgeways.”  The boy was wonderfully jolted up, and his head was bleeding, from cuts which it had got from small stones on the way.

Harris and I gathered him up and set him on a stone, and by that time the men and women had scampered down and brought his cap.