[Illustration: decoration] A BRAVE BOY. "Speaking of courage," said my friend Tom Barton, as we met one day after a long separation, "reminds me of an incident that happened at the doctors' school the first winter after you left. "It was during the Christmas holidays, and all of the boys had gone home except two brothers, named Fred and Albert Kobb, and myself. They were obliged to stay during the vacation because their parents were spending the season in Florida, and I,--well, as you know, my home was at a distance, and we were poor, so I remained at school. "The brothers were very unlike, both in appearance and character. Fred, the elder of the two, was a large, muscular, ruddy-faced boy, not much in love with books. He was of an over-bearing disposition, and had a great deal of conceit. "Albert, on the contrary, was pale and slender. He was very quiet and studious, and had such a love of honesty and truth, and such detestation of meanness and wrong, that we boys had dubbed him the 'Parson.' "It was the Saturday night between Christmas and New Year's. We three boys were hugging the stove in the little room adjoining the doctor's study. Doctor was in the study writing a sermon for the following day, as he had to preach at Milltown. "We could hear his pen scratching over the paper during the lulls in our conversation. Occasionally that 'ahem!' of his would come through the partially opened door; but somehow his 'ahems' seemed to lose their ominous character during holidays. "The subject of our conversation was a robbery that had been perpetrated at Squire Little's store the previous night. "Robberies, as you know, were unusual occurrences in the little village of Acme. Of course this one furnished a topic for abundance of talk. "Wherever we had been that day we had found some groups of men and boys talking about robberies in general, and this one in particular. "It was but natural that in the evening we boys should discuss the same subject, and each of us offered various speculations as to who the robber was, where he had gone, and whether he would be captured or not. "Then we told stories of all the daring burglaries of which we had ever heard or read, and finally described such as had happened in our own houses. "In the descriptions of our personal experiences Fred gave a glowing account of an incident that had occurred in his father's family. One night he said the coachman thought he saw a man prowling in the chicken-yard. He fired a pistol at him, and had summoned the other servants to go in pursuit of the robber. He told us how the brave men, armed with lanterns, pokers, and blunderbusses, had reached the chicken-yard, and there found traces of blood, which they followed up for a few yards, and found, lying in the last throes of death, the victim of the coachman's prowess,--a fine black Spanish rooster! "At length said I, 'What would you do if you should hear a burglar some night trying to enter your house?'