Stuarts, to help resettle the devastated north of Ireland, to say nothing of the yet wilder Irish women with whom they had mated. Nothing less than the sound of the cup scraping on the bottom of the family meal-box would impel Bob to work. Every wind that came from the great sea of grass to the westward brought him the whir of the wings of prairie-hens; dreams of bear-hunting filled his mind whenever he looked into the recesses of the woods. At sight of the rising moon his hunter's soul imagined the innumerable deer which at that hour come from their coverts to graze on the prairies. Every stream tantalized him with the thought of darting perch, and great prowling cat-fish hidden beneath its surface, and challenging him to catch them if he could. If, as we are taught to believe, the manliness of the English aristocracy and that of the American apery is only kept alive by outdoor sports, how much their superior in surplus manhood must such a man as Bob McCord be! In his estimation no days were counted a part of human life except those passed in circumventing and taking the wild creatures of the woods or the prairie, and those others spent in the rude fun of musters, barbecues, elections, corn-shuckings, wood-choppings, and like assemblages, where draughts from a generous big-bellied bottle, with a twisted neck, alternated with athletic feats, practical jokes, and tales as rude as the most unblushing of those told by pious pilgrims to Canterbury in the old religious time. It was alongside this son of Anak that Tom set himself to do a full day's work at the start. The severity of labor accorded well with his pungent feeling of penitence. Big Bob regarded him as he might any other infant, not unkindly; he even had a notion that the Widow Grayson and her children were in some sense under his care, and he did not wish any harm to come to the boy, but a practical joke was too good a thing to be missed. For two hours and a half, on that morning of Tom's appearance in the field with a scythe, Bob did not once stop to take the usual rests. Tom felt inevitable exhaustion coming on, though he cut a much narrower swath than his companion. McCord's herculean right knee was bare, having that morning forced itself through his much-bepatched trousers of butternut-dyed cotton cloth. While swinging his wider-sweeping scythe at a desperate rate, he kept telling Tom stories of adventure and the well-worn joe-millers of the log-cabin firesides, never seeming to notice the poor fellow's breathless endeavors to keep up or his ever-narrowing swath. Only when at length he turned and looked at Tom's face and perceived that the persistency of his will might carry him too far, he said, as with his scythe he picked some bunches of good grass from the edge of an elder patch and cast a wistful glance at the jug standing in a cool fence corner: