"I am going to write some things down for the boy," Old Crow began, in the neat-handed script. "He is a good little boy. He looks like me at his age. I had a kind of innocence. He has it, too. If he should grow up anything like me, I want him to have this letter"--the last word was crossed out and a more formal one substituted--"statement. If he thinks about things anyways different from what the neighbors do, they will begin to laugh at him, and try to make him believe he is not in his right mind." Over and over, through the first pages of the book, there were grammatical lapses when Old Crow, apparently from earnestness of feeling, fell into colloquial speech. This was always when he got so absorbed in his subject that he lacked the patience to go back and rewrite according to rules he certainly knew but which had ceased to govern his daily intercourse. "He must remember he may be in his right mind, for all that. If one man thinks a thing, it might be true if forty thousand men think different. The first man that thought the earth was round, when everybody else thought it was flat, was one man. The boy will be told I was crazy. He will be told I was love-cracked. I did want Selina James. She was a sweet, pretty girl and high-headed, and the things some folks thought of her were not so. But she was the kind that takes the world as it was made and asks no questions, and when I couldn't take it so and tried to explain to her how I felt about it, she didn't know any way but to laugh. Perhaps she was afraid. And she did get sick of me and turned me off. She married and went away. I was glad she went away, because it is very hard to keep seeing anybody you thought liked you and find they didn't, after all. It keeps reminding you. It was after that time I built me the hut and came up here to live.