to thrash you insteed o' John." David, with demure, downcast eyes,
looked preternaturally righteous, but as usual prudently answered
never a word.

It was a hard job in those days to bring up Scotch boys in the way
they should go; and poor overworked father was determined to do it if
enough of the right kind of switches could be found. But this time, as
the sun was getting high, he hitched up old Tom and Jerry and made
haste to the Kingston lumber-yard, leaving me unscathed and as
innocently wicked as ever; for hardly had father got fairly out of
sight among the oaks and hickories, ere all our troubles,
hell-threatenings, and exhortations were forgotten in the fun we had
lassoing a stubborn old sow and laboriously trying to teach her to go
reasonably steady in rope harness. She was the first hog that father
bought to stock the farm, and we boys regarded her as a very wonderful
beast. In a few weeks she had a lot of pigs, and of all the queer,
funny, animal children we had yet seen, none amused us more. They were
so comic in size and shape, in their gait and gestures, their merry
sham fights, and the false alarms they got up for the fun of
scampering back to their mother and begging her in most persuasive
little squeals to lie down and give them a drink.

After her darling short-snouted babies were about a month old, she
took them out to the woods and gradually roamed farther and farther
from the shanty in search of acorns and roots. One afternoon we heard
a rifle-shot, a very noticeable thing, as we had no near neighbors, as
yet. We thought it must have been fired by an Indian on the trail that
followed the right bank of the Fox River between Portage and
Packwaukee Lake and passed our shanty at a distance of about three
quarters of a mile. Just a few minutes after that shot was heard,