tacks in a pound, and how to make dynamite and flowers and beds, and
what to do before the doctor comes--and a hundred times as many things
besides. If there was anything Herkimer didn't know I didn't miss it
out of the book.

I sat and read that book for four hours. All the wonders of education
was compressed in it. I forgot the snow, and I forgot that me and old
Idaho was on the outs. He was sitting still on a stool reading away
with a kind of partly soft and partly mysterious look shining through
his tan-bark whiskers.

"Idaho," says I, "what kind of a book is yours?"

Idaho must have forgot, too, for he answered moderate, without any
slander or malignity.

"Why," says he, "this here seems to be a volume by Homer K. M."

"Homer K. M. what?" I asks.

"Why, just Homer K. M.," says he.

"You're a liar," says I, a little riled that Idaho should try to put
me up a tree. "No man is going 'round signing books with his initials.
If it's Homer K. M. Spoopendyke, or Homer K. M. McSweeney, or Homer K.
M. Jones, why don't you say so like a man instead of biting off the
end of it like a calf chewing off the tail of a shirt on a clothes-
line?"

"I put it to you straight, Sandy," says Idaho, quiet. "It's a poem