too like digging one’s own grave, and once, imagining an approach, I lay full length by the side of my fleshless friend. The day of my rejoicing had come, it is true, but there proved to be an overabundance of thorns with the rose. Here was the long-coveted skeleton; but within hearing, in the adjoining field, was a burly farmer, passing to and fro with his plow. Whenever he came near, the grinning skull grew pale, as though it, too, feared discovery; and so, until the dinner-horn sounded across-lots, I was held a prisoner. How anxiously did I listen for retreating steps and the rattling of the unloosened plow-chains!—welcome sounds that came at last, assuring me that the coast was clear. Then, leaving the treasure to the kindly sun that was rapidly warming it to hardness, I sped dinnerward. The Fates were intolerably cruel that day. At sunset, when I purposed to return, innumerable obstacles loomed up, and every excuse to run away from company that had most inopportunely arrived was pooh-poohed by madam, in a most meaning manner; and it was just midnight when the open grave was reached. The full moon at that moment broke through the clouds, and a flood of pallid light filled the spot when I shook hands with the fleshless warrior and forced myself to return the ghastly grin of his angular countenance. There was something of defiance, too, in his eyeless sockets, and a ghost of resistance as he was lifted from a couch that he had occupied for some three thousand moons at least. The rattle of his disjointedness was as harsh as the language that once he spake, and while I thridded the woods and skirted, on my way home, the resounding marshes, where every frog most ominously croaked, every jostle of the warrior’s bones seemed to force a protesting syllable between his rattling teeth. With all deference to the votaries of archæology, skeleton-lifting by moonlight is, I claim, a most uncanny pastime. Why I prefer a Country Life. Uz Gaunt was, in the writer’s experience, the most level-headed of farmers. He once remarked, “Town folks smile at my vim and way of putting things, but I’d rather be next neighbor to Natur’ than to most of the town folks.” That remark impressed me many a year ago as a nugget of pure wisdom, and now, when on the shady side of forty, I still think it wiser than any casual remark, learned essay, or eloquent oration I have ever heard in town.