death, a hard reward to him for his successful effort to save the life of a little girl.
Another memory of this room—of a Sunday afternoon. We had all been over to camp-meeting at Gospel Swamp, not that we were much addicted to camp-meeting, but it was the only available service within reach, and of course we had to go to church on Sunday. We sat on wooden benches in the dust under the willows, not an altogether unpleasant change from the usual pew, at least for the children, and Aunt Adelaide, who was camping there for the week, took us to her tent afterward and gave us some watermelon before we drove the few miles back to the ranch. But Uncle Jotham had a more exciting aftermath. He and papa and I were reading in the parlor after dinner when suddenly he gave a tremendous jump and ran upstairs three steps at a time, where we soon heard a great noise of tramping. In a minute or two he came down with a dead lizard almost a foot long spread on his New York Tri-weekly Tribune. Evidently it had mounted his bootleg over at camp-meeting and lain dormant for a couple of hours before attempting further explorations. The first jump came when the little feet struck my uncle’s knees—harmless, but uncanny.
The usual gathering place for the family was the wide porch where the sun upon the rose vines flecked the floor with shadows. The bricks that paved this open corridor were laid in an herring-bone pattern and we often practised walking with our feet set
