a big elephant like you on his back all day? I'd be 'shamed o'
myself t' set there an' let an old man carry me from Dan to
Beersheba. Git out now an' shake yer legs.'

I was the small boy and I remember it was always a great relief to
get out of the basket, and having run ahead, to lie in the grass
among the wild flowers, and jump up at him as he came along.

Uncle Eb had been working for my father five years before I was
born. He was not a strong man and had never been able to carry
the wide swath of the other help in the fields, but we all loved him
for his kindness and his knack of story-telling. He was a bachelor
who came over the mountain from Pleasant Valley, a little bundle
of clothes on his shoulder, and bringing a name that enriched the
nomenclature of our neighbourhood. It was Eben Holden.

He had a cheerful temper and an imagination that was a very
wilderness of oddities. Bears and panthers growled and were very
terrible in that strange country. He had invented an animal more
treacherous than any in the woods, and he called it a swift.
'Sumthin' like a panther', he described the look of it a fearsome
creature that lay in the edge of the woods at sundown and made a
noise like a woman crying, to lure the unwary. It would light one's
eye with fear to hear Uncle Eb lift his voice in the cry of the swift.
Many a time in the twilight when the bay of a hound or some far
cry came faintly through the wooded hills, I have seen him lift his
hand and bid us hark. And when we had listened a moment, our
eyes wide with wonder, he would turn and say in a low,
half-whispered tone: ' 'S a swift' I suppose we needed more the fear
of God, but the young children of the pioneer needed also the fear