So it come to where we seen he wasn't good for anything on this ranch but chore boy. And naturally we needed a chore boy, like we needed everything else. He could get up wood, and feed the pigs we was fattening, and milk the three dairy cows, and make butter, and help in the kitchen. But as for being a cow hand, he wasn't even the first joint on your little finger. He was willing, but his Maker had stopped right at that point with him. And he had a right happy time being chore boy. Of course the boys kidded him a lot after they found out he could positively not be enraged by the foulest aspersions on the character of the Kaiser and his oldest son. They seen he was just an innocent dreamer, mooning round the place at his humble tasks. They spent a lot of good time thinking up things for him. He'd brought a German shotgun with silver trimmings with him, which he called a fowling piece, and he wanted to hunt in his few leisure moments; so the boys told him all the kinds of game that run wild on the place. There was the cross-feathered snee, I remember, which was said by the bird books to be really the same as the sidehill mooney. It has one leg shorter than the other and can be captured by hand if driven to level ground, where it falls over on its side in a foolish manner when it tries to run. Herman looked forward to having one of these that he could stuff and send to his uncle in Cincinnati, who wrote that he had never seen such a bird. Also, he spent a lot of time down on the crick flat looking for a mu, which is the same as a sneeze-duck, except for the parallel stripes. It has but one foot webbed; so it swims in a circle and can be easy shot by the sportsman, who first baits it with snuff that it will go miles to get. Another wild beast they had him hunting was the filo, which is like the ruffle snake, except that it has a thing like a table leg in its ear. It gets up on a hill and peeks over at you, but will never come in to lunch. The boys said they nearly had one over on Grizzly Peak one time, but it swallowed its tail and become invisible to the human eye, though they could still hear its low note of pleading. Also, they had Herman looking for a mated couple of the spinach bug for which the Smithsonian Institution had offered a reward of five hundred dollars, cash. Herman fell for it all--all this old stuff that I had kicked the slats out of my trundle-bed laughing at. And in between exciting adventures with his fowling piece he'd write himself some pieces of poetry in a notebook, all about the cows and the clouds and other natural objects. He would also recite poetry written by other Germans, if let. And at night he'd play on a native instrument shaped like a potato, by blowing into one cavity and stopping up other cavities to make the notes. It would be slow music and make you think of the quiet old churchyard where your troubles would be o'er; and why not get there as soon as possible? Sad music!