to the door and shook hands with him, over the fence, and said, "How do
you do, Mr. Taylor. This is William Gordon, the son of Captain Gordon, I
told you of." Then he said, "Sho, you don't meanter say it! I served
under his grandfather." And Aunty Edith said to me, "William, Mr. Taylor
was a soldier in the army all through the Civil War, and he can tell you
lots about it." So I went over to his house and we sat on his back
porch, and he smoked a pipe, and I played with all his Teddy-cats.

[Illustration]

Mr. Taylor told me he was seventy-three years old, and I said, "My! I'd
never guessed it, you look younger than that"; and he said, "Yes, boy,
I'm stepping along."

Then he told me when he was a boy he worked on one of the canal boats,
and at that time there were many more boats, for most of the freight,
that goes in freight trains now on railroads, came down the canal in
boats. After that he enlisted in the army and went away out West. He
told me when he was young the West was the West, and you could shoot
buffaloes. He knows because he shot them. Then when the Civil War broke
out, he stayed in the army, enlisted again and fought all through it,
and came home with a bullet in his leg.

His father was a cooper and built the stone house Mr. Taylor lives in
for a cooper shop, and that was why it was built so solid and had such
thick walls. He took me into the cellar and showed it to me, for that
was where they set the iron hoops to cool. I asked him who lived with
him in it, and he said he was all alone, everybody was gone, he said,
but him. I told him about my father and mother then, and how I would be
all alone if it wasn't for Uncle Burt, and he said Uncle Burt was a fine