Little Shetland. Meanwhile, we must be making all the noise we can, clapping our hands and shouting: 'Hurrah! hurrah! splendid! splendid!' Should our demonstrations fall short of the desired effect, and we should happen to hear some of our red neighbors shouting and yelling over there in the woods, we will call them in to help us out. They will make noise enough to slack his thirst for applause, I warrant you. They will be so delighted with his performance that nothing will satisfy them short of taking him home with them—Blue Blaze, coltie and all—to old Chillicothe, where he shall be kept all his days to play Big Paleface for the reds, just as Jack Monkey is kept in the Old Dominion to play Dandy Nigger for the whites.

"Yes, pap, get him the red moccasins. Let him make a monkey of himself, and 'be somebody and so happy.'"

Now, you must know that our hero, though tough to reproof, was keenly sensitive to ridicule—a jimson weed to that, a snap dragon to this. Having discovered his weakness, his mother was much in the habit of playing upon it, as the only means of persuasion or dissuasion within her command which was likely to make any impression upon his knotty young rind. So, while she was spinning out her rigmarole, Sprigg was making a great show of amusing himself with Pow-wow, slapping him over the muzzle with his coonskin cap, or setting that ornament in divers ways on the old dog's head; now with the tail over the right ear, then over the left, or over the nose; the young sauce-box the while keeping up, in a confidential undertone to his four-footed chum, a running commentary on his mother's burlesque of himself, for every word of which he should have received a sounding spank.

"Some folks think they are monstrous smart, don't they, Pow-wow?"

"You could bark tip a tree and do better than that, couldn't you, Pow-wow?"

"Funny enough to make a dog laugh, isn't it, Pow-wow?"

"Some folks ought to be told what fools they are, oughtn't they, Pow-wow?"

won't we, Pow-wow?"

CHAPTER III.

Meets with the Object of His Love.

So, next Monday, Jervis Whitney set out on his long tramp, with Pow-wow for company, and with Black Bess, his rifle, to keep them supplied with game, their chief dependence for subsistence while traveling the five hundred miles of wilderness, which lay between them and their old home beyond the Alleghenies. While they were gone, Sprigg kept count of the months and weeks and days, and, as they went silently gliding by, he went silently dreaming on about the red moccasins. Silently, for never another word said he to his mother concerning the matter he had so near at heart. He knew she would laugh at him, and call him a monkey—our hero, bear in mind, being as touchy to ridicule as a raw mouth to ginger. You might scold him and rate him, sneap him and snub him, to a degree you would suppose sufficient to break the heart of any boy who knew his catechism, yet not a fig nor a flint would he care for it all. Perhaps, he would kick up his heels in the very face of your reproof; or, it may be, merely wrinkle up his saucy young knob of a nose, thereby saying as plainly as words could say it:

The month of May was drawing near its close. Night was spreading its dusky shadows over the lonely forest home. The turkey-cock had gone to its rest; so had the red-bird, so had the jay-bird; so had Sprigg. Elster had heard her boy repeat his prayers and was now singing him to sleep with a hymn; a pious custom which, in all sincerity, she had faithfully observed from his infancy up; doing her best, from night to night, to make him a Christian, while suffering him, from day to day, to become more and more of a heathen. Such parental inconsistencies were rare in the days of Mary Washington, but are so common nowadays that no one excepting himself or herself can find an exception to the rule except at home. The last line of the hymn had just been sung, and Sprigg was making his last big sleepy wink at the cradle before fairly off for nodland, when they heard, first, a glad yelp out there in the yard, which they thought they knew; then a brisk, firm step on the loose board floor of the porch, which they were certain they knew. Up from her chair sprang Elster; up from his bed bounced Sprigg, and by the time the door, with a ringing click of its wooden latch, swung open, both were there, and both hugged tight in the long, strong arms of husband and father.

"Heaven be thanked!" exclaimed Elster, kissing her husband for the——, but I must not say what number of times.

"The moccasins! the moccasins!—where are my red moccasins?" cried Sprigg, who had not kissed nor hugged his father once.

"You young feather-pate! you jay-bird!" exclaimed Jervis. "Can't you give your poor pap some little sign of welcome first?"

"Oh! then, you have got them! You have got them!" And now, assured that such was the case, Sprigg could find it in his heart to hug and kiss his father, which he did as sleekly and lovingly as any he-kitten. But Sprigg paid for this bit of selfishness, and that dearly, too. Having laid Black Bess in the rifle-hooks over the fireplace, and hung his bearskin cap on the hook to the left and his ammunition pouch and powder horn on the hook to the right, Jervis hugged and kissed his wife again. Then, from the capacious game bag which, slung by a strap from the shoulder, he wore at his side, he began drawing out slowly and with great show of carefulness a small package, which Sprigg instinctively knew to be the object of his heart's desire. The next moment, held high aloft in pap's right hand, there they were at last, in plain view before his eyes, the long dreamed of red moccasins. How beautiful looked they. Trimmed with the finest of fur and glittering all over with the brightest of beads, to say nothing of the color—red, as the reddest of leather could be, not dyed in blood. You would have laughed, or, perhaps, felt more like crying, to have seen the poor, vain boy, as he stood there, with his heart in his eyes, gazing gloatingly up at the moccasins as if the very shine of them had charmed him out of his senses. Thus he stood for several moments till, giving a quick turn of the head, he glanced sharply up at the Indian boy on the show bill, as if half expecting to find the young horseman stripped of his moccasins and now performing his equestrian antics in bare feet.

"Jervis," said Elster, grieved and provoked, "I am so surprised that you should indulge our boy in so ridiculous a fancy, as were he, after all, the monkey he would make himself. I had no idea that you would ever give the whim a second thought. Why did you not get him the boots you have been promising him? Throw the moccasins into the fire and let us be rid of the nuisance at once! If you won't, I will!"

"Mum, Elster! Mum! I neither bought them nor sought them. They were sent as a present to our boy by some one, who said that he was one of Sprigg's very best friends; and that he could not do a better part by our boy and ourselves, too, than to let him have them and wear them, a little experience being all that he needed to