“I was fixing to lay him down in a soft spot when I saw a man was on the bank. He was jumping up and down and yelling: ‘I caynt swim a stroke! I caynt swim a stroke!’ ‘Then you hold the baby,’ says I; and I dumped poor Davy into his arms. When we got the boy up the bank he looked plumb dead; but Dave said: ‘He ain’t dead! He caynt be dead! I won’t have him dead!’ wild like, and began rubbing him. I ran to the man. If you please, there that unfortunate man was, in the same place, holding Baby as far away from him as he could get, as if he was a dynamite bomb that might go off at any minute. ‘Give me your pipe,’ says I. ‘You will have to fish it out of my pocket yourself,’ says he; ‘I don’t dast loose a hand from this here baby!’ And he did look funny! But you may imagine I didn’t notice that then. I ran back quick’s I could, and we rubbed that boy and worked his arms and, you may say, blowed the breath of life into him. We worked more’n a hour—that poor man holding the baby the enduring time: I reckon _his_ arms were stiff’s ours!—and I’d have given him up: it seemed awful to be rumpling up a corpse that way. But Dave, he only set his teeth and cried, ‘Keep on, I _will_ save him!’” “And you _did_ save him?” “_He_ did,” flashed the wife; “he’d be in his grave but for Dave. I’d given him up. And his mother knows it. And she said that if that child was not named Johnny ayfter his paw, she’d name him David ayfter Mist’ Brown; but seeing he was named, she’d do next best, give him David for a middle. And as calling him Johnny David seemed too long, they always call him Johnny D. But won’t you rest your hat on the bed and sit down, Mister—” “Wickliff,” finished Amos; but he added no information regarding his dwelling-place or his walk in life, and, being a Southerner, she did not ask it. By this time she was getting supper ready for the guest. Amos was sure she was a good cook the instant his glance lighted on her snowy and shapely rolls. He perceived that he was to have a much daintier meal than he had ever had before in the “Nation,” yet he frowned at the wall. All the innocent, laborious, happy existence of the pair was clear to him as she talked, pleased with so good a listener. The dominant impression which her unconscious confidences made on him was her content. “I reckon I am a natural-born farmer,” she laughed. “I fairly crave to make things grow, and I love the very smell of the earth and the grass. It’s beautiful out here.” “But aren’t you ever lonesome?”