The nephew was lying on the grass near by, wearing a kind of dove-colored suit; so that from a distance he might have been taken for a huge mound of vegetable mould; he having just awakened from a nap: a heavy, rank, insolent, human cub with his powers half pent up and half unfolded, except a fully developed insolence toward all things and people except his uncle, himself, and his friend, Fred Ousley. He rolled drowsily about on the soft turf, waiting to take his turn at the newspaper: it was the only thing he read: otherwise he was too busy reading the things of life on the farm. Once he stretched himself on his back, looking upward for anything and everything in sight. The light breeze swung the boughs of the locust, now heavily draped with blossoms; and soon his eyes began to follow what looked like a flame darting in and out amid the snowy cascades of bloom--a flame that was vocal and that dropped down upon his ear crimson petals of song--the Baltimore oriole. He liked all birds but three; and presently one of those that he disliked appeared in a fork of a locust and darted at the oriole, driving it away and then returning to the fork--the blue-jay. His hatred of this bird dated from the time when one of the negroes had told him that no blue-jays could be seen at twelve o'clock on Friday--all having gone to carry brimstone to the lower regions. After that he and Fred Ousley had made a point of trying to kill jays early Friday morning: a fatally shied stone would cut off to a dead certainty just so much of that supply of brimstone. He hated them even more on Saturday, when he thought of them as having returned. The one in the fork now was looking down at him, and, with a great mockery of bowing, called out his _Fiddle-Fiddle-Fiddle_: it was his way of saying: "You'll get there: and there will be brimstone, sonny!" Of course he believed none of this legend; but suggestions live on in the mind even though they do not root themselves in faith; and memory also has its power to make us like and dislike. Presently, as he lay there stretched on the grass and near the edge of the shade, another ill-omened bird came sailing cloud-high across the blue firmament; and having taken notice of him,--a motionless form on the earth below,--it turned back and began to circle about him. That was another bird he hated. When a child he asked about it, and had been told that it removed all disagreeable things from the farms. He thought it a very kind, very self-sacrificing and industrious bird to do so. And he conceived the whole species of them as a procession of wheelbarrows operated across the sky by means of wings and tails. Afterwards, when his views grew less hazy on natural history, he lowered his opinion of the disinterested buzzard.