not expect an invitation to stop with people. He would walk in, take off his hat, and, when the meal was ready, take his seat at the table. It never seemed to enter his mind that people might not want him, or that it could possibly be inconvenient to keep him. He was a glib

talker. You had hardly time yourself to think whether you wanted him or not, he talked so incessantly. From the time he entered the door, till he was out of sight, he talked. Most people enjoyed him. His intelligence was above the average. He knew it, and presumed on it, and no doubt regarded himself somewhat in the light of a philanthropist. Into the monotonous life of many an early home he went, and furnished it a little variety from the humdrum of daily toil. He was a walking cyclopedia of country news. He answered the purpose of a local newspaper. He was like the interlude in a Church hymn. He gave you time to get your breath, and that in a realistic way; because you could hardly get in a word edgeways. Mother's opinion of him was, that he liked a change of victuals, and that, while he was not lazy—that is to say, lazy-he could stand a vast amount of rest. Timothy Copenhaver was this man's name, and his forte was a witch story. He either believed in them or not, as suited the

occasion. He could spin them out of his own brain like webs from a spider. Whenever I knew he was to be with us over night, I managed to get to bed and asleep before he got started. In the times I failed in this, I fought witches all night in my sleep. Mother saw this, and managed to help me get to sleep. But I suffered greatly under this man's witch stories. In memory of my own suffering, I want to enter here my protest against telling witch stories to children. The child-mind is too pliable; it is too wholly unprotected, and is not able to detect the difference between the real and the mythical in human speech. It takes all these apprehensions as realities, and broods over them, and conjures pictures more horrid, and adds to them, till the young life is a flood of fears.

Now, I want to contradict my preaching, and tell a witch story; but its features will be of the milder sort, and I give it partly for the business there is in it, and as characteristic of the time. The spring I was seven years old, we sold our improved farm, with the intention of going farther west. Father made a trip of inspection, and returned without finding a satisfactory location. Three miles south of us was a farm of two hundred and forty acres, of great natural richness and beauty, owned by one Tom

Dorkey. Dorkey believed in witches. The witches had always had entirely too much to do with his affairs. For many years, off and on, he was bothered. His baulky horses were bewitched. That was his interpretation of it. The ordinary interpretation of a baulky horse, however, is a baulky man. The witches would get into his cows, and make them give bloody milk. They would ride his hogs into the woods, and run them wild. The witches would spoil his wife's soap. They would attack Dorkey personally. They would put splinters into his eyes. He could never go to Manning's grocery without being kept till late in the night, and then be put on his horse with his face to the rear. They would pull the corks out of his whisky-jugs and upset them-a most cruel and grievous offense this. They would take him out of his bed at night, and ride him over the country, barefooted and freezing. One night they hitched him to a gate-post, and went off and left him. Where he was he did not know. It was a strange and peculiar place. He thought he would mark that gate-post with his teeth, so that he might find it the next day. He arose next morning to find he had been trying the bed-post with his teeth. The witches kept getting worse with Dorkey, and he made up his

mind to move. He was looking around for a buyer when father met him. The trade was soon made, and a fair price was agreed upon. To clinch the trade, father paid him three hunhundred dollars. This was before getting a deed. After the trade had been made a few days, the witches with Dorkey had been getting better, he said, and he was about to "back out." Things then were in such a shape that if he did, father would probably lose his three hundred dollars. I do not know precisely how that was, but one foundation for the fear was that Dorkey was tricky, as well as superstitious. So it came to pass, as the witches got better with Dorkey, they got worse with father. It was

known that he took more interest in the witches in this case, than in all the tales he had ever heard Copenhaver spin. He wished no man any harm, but he would venture to wish that Dorkey would have another bad spell. He would lie awake at night, and wish that that very night the witches might give Dorkey another twist, so he could get his deed. This man Dorkey had the constant services of a witch-doctor, Elkin Snider. Snider was too lazy to work, but a little too sharp for the majority of people in the country. He made a splendid living out of their superstitions. He had already impover

ished Dorkey. A witch-doctor, you know, can not charge, and be paid a regular fee. You just put all the money you have in your outside coat pocket-on the left side. If there is any reserve, mental or financial, Ananias and Sapphira-like, it will not work. The witch-doctor puts his hand in that pocket, and takes out a sum each trip. The amount is never to be counted, even by himself. One morning, after

the witches had been distressingly quiet with Dorkey for more than a month, father mounted his horse and rode over to see Snider. He rode up to the gate, and called the doctor out. He told him he had bought Dorkey's farm, and that he was about to renege, and that he needed to be doctored for the witches till he was made honest enough to stand by his contract, or refund the money paid. Father handed him five dollars. Snider took the money, and, without looking at it, put it in his pocket, and turned abruptly around, and walked back into his cabin, and shut the door. Father saw that his interview with Snider had ended. He was puzzled and displeased. But there was not much help for the situation. Here was one man a professional hypocrite; another engaged, to say the least, in a little sharp practice. There was a sense in which both understood the other per