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Aunt Deel put me to bed although it was only five o'clock. As I lay looking up at the shingles a singular resolution came to me. It was born of my longing for the companionship of my kind and of my resentment. I would go and live with the Dunkelbergs. I would go the way they had gone and find them.

I knew that women had a different and less satisfactory method, for I remembered that my mother had spanked me and Aunt Deel had a way of giving my hands and head a kind of watermelon thump with the middle finger of her right hand and with a curious look in her eyes. Uncle Peabody used to call it a "snaptious look." Almost always he whacked the bed with his slipper.

We unhitched and went in to supper. I was hoping that Aunt Deel would speak of my work but she seemed not to think of it. "Had a grand day!" said Uncle Peabody, as he sat down at the table and began to tell what Mr. Wright and Mr. Dunkelberg had said to him. I, too, had had a grand day and probably my elation was greater than his.

I lived with my Aunt Deel and my Uncle Peabody Baynes on a farm. They were brother and sister he about thirty-eight and she a little beyond the far-distant goal of forty. My father and mother died in a scourge of diphtheria that swept the neighborhood when I was a boy of five. For a time my Aunt Deel seemed to blame me for my loss.

In the midst of my preparations the man of gristle decided that he would like to go with me and see the world and try his fortune in another part of the country. How it wrung my heart, when Mr. Purvis and I got into the stage at Canton, to see my aunt and uncle standing by the front wheel looking up at me. How old and lonely and forlorn they looked! Aunt Deel had her purse in her hand.

To Aunt Deel men-folks were a careless, irresponsible and mischievous lot who had to be looked after all the time or there was no telling what would happen to them. She slipped some extra pairs of socks and a bottle of turpentine into the pack basket and told us what we were to do if we got wet feet or sore throats or stomach ache. Wright, and my uncle.

Side- The enhabitents of those houses had left them closely Shut up, they appeared to Contn. a great deel of property and Provisions Such as those people use, I did not disturb any thing about those houses, but proceed on down below the rapid which I found to be the last, a large village has at Some period been on the Stard.

Aunt Deel kept nudging me under the table and giving me sharp looks to remind me of my manners, for now it seemed as if a time had come when eating was a necessary evil to be got through with as soon as possible. Even Uncle Peabody tapped his cup lightly with his teaspoon, a familiar signal of his by which he indicated that I was to put on the brakes.

I remember telling him as we went on over the rough road, between fields of ripened grain, of my watermelon and my dog and my little pet hen. I shall not try to describe that home coming. We found Aunt Deel in the road five miles from home. She had been calling and traveling from house to house most of the night, and I have never forgotten her joy at seeing me and her tender greeting.

In those magazines we read of the great West "the poor man's paradise" "the stoneless land of plenty"; of its delightful climate, of the ease with which the farmer prospered on its rich soil. Uncle Peabody spoke playfully of going West, after that, but Aunt Deel made no answer and concealed her opinion on that subject for a long time.