About Nicodemus's usual bedtime--midnight--the village jokers came creeping stealthily through the jimpson weeds and sunflowers toward the lonely frame den.
They reached the window and peeped in.

There sat the long-legged pauper, on his bed, in a very short shirt, and nothing more; he was dangling his legs contentedly back and forth, and wheezing the music of "Camptown Races" out of a paper-overlaid comb which he was pressing against his mouth; by him lay a new jewsharp, a new top, and solid india-rubber ball, a handful of painted marbles, five pounds of "store" candy, and a well-gnawed slab of gingerbread as big and as thick as a volume of sheet-music.

He had sold the skeleton to a traveling quack for three dollars and was enjoying the result! Just as we had finished talking about skeletons and were drifting into the subject of fossils, Harris and I heard a shout, and glanced up the steep hillside.

We saw men and women standing away up there looking frightened, and there was a bulky object tumbling and floundering down the steep slope toward us.

We got out of the way, and when the object landed in the road it proved to be a boy.