“So far as I know, there’s only three veneering mills in the country. When I sold my tree I wrote a letter to all three of ’em and told ’em what I had to sell and they wrote back and made me a offer—only that Kentucky fellow, he’s the nearest by and he made out like he had business in this direction and he stopped round to see it; and ’twas him I sold the tree to. “And I aimed to work it jes’ that-a-way for Cap’n Sumter; I aimed to write the letters for him—for he ain’t a mite handy with a pen, Sam Sumter ain’t (a education is a mighty handy thing to get hold of Grover Cleveland), and get in the three bids for the tree and let him take up with ary one he see fit.” “You’ve sure done your duty by him now, daddy,” said Carolina, “and that tree is yours anyway you can fix it.” “_Is_ it yours, gran’daddy?” “It’s mine by rule o’ law, Grover Cleveland, but I don’t know as it’s mine by that ar golden rule that you and Preacher Carr let on to know so much about.” His doting grandparent considered the child a prodigy of ethical understanding, or “jedgment,” as he would have expressed it, and, although he was continually plying him with information and advice on all sorts of subjects, it was no uncommon thing for him to consult the little fellow even in matters of moment. It was as if he stored his maxims and admonitions into the laboratory of the child’s mind and then requisitioned it for them in convenient form for practical use. “What’s your opinion, Grover Cleveland?’” The child hesitated, his bright face raised earnestly to the grizzled one: “Me and you, gran’daddy, me and you, we don’t want anything that ain’t sure ’nough ours; do we?” “_No-o sir-ee!_ That settles it, Carliny; Grover Cleveland and me we want a golden rule title to every thing we claim.” So Colonel Ledbetter got his ink bottle and pen off the shelf, a sheet and a half of writing-paper out of the front of the Bible, and three envelopes out of the back, and laboriously indited the letters to the veneering mills, while out in the shadow of the prize pumpkin his grandson cracked butternuts for the tame gray squirrels. But all the while new ideas were whirling through the little boy’s head, and they concentred in that curly walnut.