“A pleggy sight, I suppose,” he resumed. “What specie o’ critter ye got hold on naow?” and he stretched forward his fringed and weather-beaten neck, and peered over the brambles. “What is’t ye got thar--straddle-bug?” He came still nearer, and looked at the spider. “Wa’al, darn my pictur ef ’tain’t an old yeller-belly! P’r’aps you don’t know that them critters is pizen. Why, Eben Sanford’s gal got all chawed up by one on ’em. Great Sneezer!” he exclaimed, taking three or four strides backward, with both hands uplifted. I had merely raised my hand and gently smoothed the spider. “Wa’al,” he continued, “yen kin rub ’em daown ef yeu pleze; but fer _my_ part, I’d ruther keep off abaout a good spittin’ distance”--which was the Shoopegg way of expressing a length of about fifteen feet. Amos was crossing lots for his “caow,” he said; but in spite of his plea that the “old heiffer” was “bellerin’” like “Sam Hill,” and was “gittin’ ’tarnal on-easy,” I made him tarry sufficiently long to enable me to send him off a wiser man. Amos Shoopegg is a type of a large class of the native element of Hometown. Of course, “Shoopegg” is not his actual name. In the long line of his prided Puritan ancestry no one ever bore it before him. This is only an affectionate epithet given him by the village boys full twenty years ago, and it has stuck to him closer than a brother ever since, as those festive surnames always do. Nominally, Amos was a farmer. In summer he was one in fact, and could swing off as pretty a swath in haying as any man in town. But in the winter he changed his vocation, and became a disciple of the “waxed-end.” All day long he could be seen, closeted with a little red-hot stove, plying his trade in his small, square shop, up near the old red school-house. Here he pounded on the big lapstone on his knees, or, with strap and foot-stick in position, punched and tugged around the edge of those marvellous brogans. He made slings and leather “suckers” for the boys, and furnished them with all the black-wax they could chew--or stow-away, to stick between the lining of their pockets. And the huge wooden shoe-pegs that he drove beneath his hammer were a sight to behold. The man who used his “cheap line of goods” might verily say he walked upon a wood-pile.