Michael advanced on the intruders, shouting in a rather thin voice, “Drop the rags, and scram!” He waved his cudgel. No results. Michael didn’t like having his efforts go for naught that way. The laughter went out of his eyes. His Irish was up. He resisted an impulse at belligerence. Then, “Vamoose, I tell you, or bygorry you’ll be knowing the feel of this shillelagh!” Now, however, his belligerent interest was superseded by new elements. The girls did not budge. Not then. They laughed mightily. All but one. The Good Samaritan shook with suppressed laughter. Her orange bonnet bobbed in fine harmony. The little doggie barked. With deep concern and echoes of mortification trailing in her voice, the laughless one, stepping forward—it was now observed that she held in her hand a shillelagh of her own, once again of magic sumac origin—exclaimed, “Holy horrors! Look Michael! Your manners! There do be a hole in your shield!” This he took to indicate her desire for him to depart — as, indeed, it did. And Michael, our defender, “took water.” You must believe me now when I say to you that the never-to-be-dispensed-with three-time act, peculiarly and persistently the boy’s very own, was delayed somewhat. “You bet!” MISS INTERPRETED My mother cautioned my sister Nannie when a very little girl as she was going out to play, to look good for snakes. After she had returned, Nannie told her mother that she had looked everywhere and did not see “ary snake.” Asked what would she have done had she found one, Nannie said, “I would of bringed it to you.” THE “CIRCUS” LAYOUT Published in Wetmore Spectator, January 10, 1936. By John T. Bristow Now, I trust “Buddy” will be satisfied with the foregoing narration of events at the old swimming hole. He really should be. He is in it—figuring inversely, up to his neck. Since the actual distance from the swimming hole to the tanyard was but twenty steps—and I mean literally steps—there should be no difficulty in making the switch over. Those twenty steps did, however, at times, present physical hazards. They were dirt steps carved out on a rather steeply inclined bank, up which the tanner’s sons carried water in buckets from pond to tanvat. Barefooted, with pants rolled up to our knees, we would dig in with our toes when going up with the filled buckets, always spilling a little water on the way, until those steps would become a veritable otter’s slide. As a boy’s bare heels, in the old days, were poorly fashioned for digging in, the water carriers would then have to use the longer rope-protected path provided for making the descent with the empty buckets. One slippery slide on one’s backside was a hint that it was time to make the switch.