"Oh, I keep a lookout, and spy around, and stand guard over the fence with my gun." "Gee, I wisht I had a war in my family!" sighed Philip, fervently. _Thursday._ Two more nights of suffering,--Philip said to me this morning, "I heared you up a-fleaing four or five times in the night." When I found that several panels of the back fence had been washed away by the "tide" of week-before-last, and that neighborhood hogs were coming in and out at will, and making their beds under my very room, I did not wonder. This morning at the breakfast table, Philip's face was so dingy that I inquired, "Have you washed your face?" "Yes," was his reply. Something moved me to inquire further, "When?" "Day before yesterday," he replied, with perfect nonchalance. This is dangerous,--already I can see that Philip is to be, like his illustrious namesake "the glass of fashion and the mold of form," and that the younger boys, will be only too ready to omit disagreeable rites if he does. Poor Keats, who in the matter of beauty certainly lives up to his name, really seems inconsolable. While he cleans the chicken-yard in the mornings, my heart is wrung by hearing him chant the most dismal of songs, Oh bury me not, on the broad pa-ra-a-ree, Where the wild ky-oats will holler over me! and in the hour after supper, when the others play out of doors, he sits with me, telling about Nervesty and the four little children at home, and the spell of typhoid all the family had last year, when his father and little sister Dicey died, and how "Me 'n' Nervesty and Hen" have run the farm since then, tending fifteen acres of corn, besides clearing new-ground, and other labors. Poor little man, it is the knowledge that he is really needed at home, as much as homesickness, that preys on his mind,--his mother is making a noble sacrifice to let him stay in the school. It seems to comfort him somewhat to weep on a sympathetic bosom. Peppermint candy, too, is not without its efficacy. To-day came Taulbee Bolling, a dignified boy of thirteen, with a critical eye, and later, Mr. Atkins again, with the "pure scholar" in tow. Iry is a thin, puny-looking mite of ten, much too small for his trousers. He said "Yes sir" and "No sir" most politely when speaking to me, and carried an old blue-back speller under one arm. So great was my curiosity that I opened the book at once. The result was amazing,--"genealogical" and "irreconcilable" were child's-play to him, "incomprehensibility," a bagatelle. It was interesting to see his scared little face brighten as he climbed up and down the hard words and beheld my growing astonishment. [Illustration: "'Genealogical' and 'irreconcilable' were child's play to him, 'incomprehensibility,' a bagatelle."]