made strenuous efforts to keep me at home, and did so until I was
sixteen. I suppose it is natural for every country boy to be
fascinated with some other occupation than the one to which he is
bred. In my early teens, I always thought I should like either to
drive six horses to a stage or clerk in a store, and if I could have
attained either of those lofty heights, at that age, I would have
asked no more. So my father, rather than see me follow in the
footsteps of my older brothers, secured me a situation in a village
store some twenty miles distant. The storekeeper was a fellow
countryman of my father--from the same county in Ireland, in fact--and
I was duly elated on getting away from home to the life of the
village.

But my elation was short-lived. I was to receive no wages for the
first six months. My father counseled the merchant to work me hard,
and, if possible, cure me of the "foolish notion," as he termed it.
The storekeeper cured me. The first week I was with him he kept me in
a back warehouse shelling corn. The second week started out no better.
I was given a shovel and put on the street to work out the poll-tax,
not only of the merchant but of two other clerks in the store. Here
was two weeks' work in sight, but the third morning I took breakfast
at home. My mercantile career had ended, and forthwith I took to the
range as a preacher's son takes to vice. By the time I was twenty
there was no better cow-hand in the entire country. I could, besides,
speak Spanish and play the fiddle, and thought nothing of riding
thirty miles to a dance. The vagabond temperament of the range I
easily assimilated.

Christmas in the South is always a season of festivity, and the magnet
of mother and home yearly drew us to the family hearthstone. There we