If the answer was negative; all business was laid aside until the withered little old man was found, pottering bout some of the odd jobs by which he earned his living. He was always as pleased as Punch to be asked to perform, and laid aside his tools with a foolish, bragging grin on his face, of which grandfather has told me so many times that it seems as if I had really seen it. This is how he told the story, always word for word the same way: "Wa'al, sir, I've had queer things happen to me in my time, hain't I, boys?"--at which the surrounding crowd always wagged mocking heads--"but nothin' to beat that. When I was ashore wunst, from one of my long v'y'ges on the sea, I was to Kennettown, Massachusetts." "How'd ye come to go there, Jed?" This was a question never to be omitted. "Oh, I had a great sight of money to take to some folks that lived there. The captain of our ship had died at sea, and he give me nine thousand five hundred and seventy-two English gold guineas, to take to his brother and sister." Here he always stared around at the company, and accepted credulously the counterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated amazement which was given him. "Wa'al, sir, I done it. I give the gold to them as it belonged to, and I was to leave town on the noon stagecoach. I was stayin' in the captain's brother's house. It was spang up against the woods, on the edge of town; and, I tell ye, woods _was_ woods in them days. "The mornin' I was to leave I was up early, lookin' out of my window, when what should I see with these mortial eyes but a gre't bull moose, as big as two yoke o' oxen, comin' along toward the house. He sort o' staggered along, and then give a gre't sigh I could hear from my room--I was on the ground floor--fell down on his knees, and laid his head on the ground 's if he was too beat out to go another step. Wa'al, sir, I never waited not long enough even to fetch a holler to wake the folks I just dove out o' the window, and made for him as fast as I could lick in. As I went by the wood-pile, I grabbed up a big stick of wood----" "What kind of wood?" everybody asked in chorus. "'Twas a big stick of birch-wood, with the white bark on it as clean as writin'-paper. I grabbed that up for a club--'twas the only thing in sight--and when I got to the moose I hit him a clip on the side of the head as hard as I could lay on. He didn't so much as open an eye, but I saw he was still breathing and I climbed up on his back so's to get a good whack at the top of his head. And then, sir, by Jupiter! he riz right up like a earthquake under me, and started off at forty miles an hour. He throwed his head back as he run, and ketched me right between his horns, like a nut in a nutcracker. I couldn't have got out of them horns--no, sir, a charge of powder couldn't scarcely have loosened me."