without selling something. You can't even give the dogs away—and I would n't let you impose on anybody that way, if you could; so you 'll have to sell some of the negroes. They are lazy and no-account enough, goodness knows, but they can manage to walk around and pick up chips and get a thimbleful of milk from twenty cows, and sweep off the porch when there 's anybody to keep them awake."
Nevertheless, the colonel got his beagle, and he soon came to take more interest in it than in all his other dogs. He named it Jeff, after Matt Kilpatrick's old beagle, and Jeff turned out to be the cutest little dog ever seen in that section. The colonel trained him assiduously. Twice a day he 'd hold Jeff and make one of the little negroes run down by the spring-house and out across the cow-lot. When the little negro was well out of sight the colonel would unleash Jeff and away the miniature hunt would go across the fields, the colonel cheering it on in regulation style.
The colonel's "nigger dog" was eight months old when he was taken in hand, and by the time he was a year old he had developed amazingly. The claim was gravely made that
