For your eighty was a picture--
Running spring and good clear land--
Everything a body needed
For a starter, right at hand.
Well, some others left 'fore I did--
You remember Mac, of course,
How he got the moving notion
When Bill Kelly missed his horse?
Chased him clear to Old Man's crossing,
So I heard the posse say;
Thought they had him fairly cornered,
But, by jings! he got away.


16

"There are stranger things than fiction;
What is natural may seem queer,
So I s'pose we needn't wonder
At the things we see out here.
One thing happened since you left there
That I call a burning shame--
Did you know that rope-necked Johnson
Jumped your eighty-acre claim?
Last I saw him, he was plowing,
And he laughed and tried to joke:
Said 'twas kind of you to leave him
All the ground that you had broke;
Said your house was so untidy
He was sleeping out of doors,