in a place where the trees were thick, while father brought from
the cart a coil of small rope. We wound it about the trees, so the
sheep were shut in a little yard. After supper we all sat by the
fire, while D'ri told how he had been chased by wolves in the
beaver country north of us.

D'ri was an odd character. He had his own way of expressing the
three degrees of wonder, admiration, and surprise.
"Jerushy!"--accented on the second syllable--was the positive,
"Jerushy Jane!" the comparative, and "Jerushy Jane Pepper!" the
superlative. Who that poor lady might be I often wondered, but
never ventured to inquire. In times of stress I have heard him
swear by "Judas Priest," but never more profanely. In his youth he
had been a sailor on the lake, when some artist of the needle had
tattooed a British jack on the back of his left hand--a thing he
covered, of shame now, when he thought of it. His right hand had
lost its forefinger in a sawmill. His rifle was distinguished by
the name of Beeswax,--"Ol' Beeswax" he called it sometimes,--for no
better reason than that it was "easy spoke an' hed a kind uv a
powerful soun' tew it." He had a nose like a shoemaker's thumb:
there was a deep incurve from its wide tip to his forehead. He had
a large, gray, inquiring eye and the watchful habit of the
woodsman. Somewhere in the midst of a story he would pause and
peer thoughtfully into the distance, meanwhile feeling the
pipe-stem with his lips, and then resume the narrative as suddenly
as he had stopped. He was a lank and powerful man, six feet tall
in his stockings. He wore a thin beard that had the appearance of
parched grass on his ruddy countenance. In the matter of hair,
nature had treated him with a generosity most unusual. His heavy
shock was sheared off square above his neck.