III.

THE CHERITY OF THE JONESVILLIANS.


We have been havin' a pound party here in Jonesville. There wuz a
lot of children left without any father or mother, nobody only an
old grandma to take care of 'em, and she wuz half bent with the
rheumatiz, and had a swelled neck, and lumbago and fits.

They lived in an old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville.
The father wuz, I couldn't deny, a shiftless sort of a chap,
good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn'nt
no faculty. And I don't know, come to think of it, as anybody is
any more to blame if they are born without a faculty, than if they
are born with only one eye. Faculty is one of the things that you
can't buy.

He loved to hunt. That is, he loved to hunt some kinds of things.
He never loved to hunt stiddy, hard work, and foller on the trail
of it till he evertook success and captured it. No, he druther
hunt after catamounts and painters, in woods where catamounts
haint mounted, and painters haint painted sence he wuz born.

He generally killed nothin' bigger than red squirrels and chipmunks.
The biggest game he ever brought down wuz himself. He shot himself
one cold day in the fall of the year. He wuz gettin' over a brush
fence, they s'posed the gun hit against somethin' and went off, for
they found him a layin' dead at the bottom of the fence.