I believe there was nothing he could not do. He shingled hair in a superb manner for any one who applied, and charged nothing for the service. And I helped him learn the art, for he practised on me so much that I was nearly always bald. He made everything he took a fancy for, and seemed to possess himself of the contents of a book by looking through it; for though I seldom found him reading, he was about as well-informed as the books themselves. When the folks were away at camp-meeting, he added my mother’s work to his own, and got along very well with it. I never heard of anything a Fairview boy could do better than Jo Erring, and he did a great many things in which he had no competition; therefore I have often wondered that the only young man there who really amounted to anything was for some reason rather unpopular. Jo was unfortunate in the particular that he seemed to have inherited all the poorer qualities of both his father and mother instead of the good qualities of either one of them, or a commendable trait from one, and an undesirable one from the other. I have heard of men who resembled the less worthy of their parents--I believe this is the rule--but never before have I known a boy to resemble both his parents in everything they tried to hide. His tendency to exaggeration he got honestly from his mother, who was a fluent talker, but Jo was not like her in that. In this Jo was like his father, who would not say a half dozen words without becoming hopelessly entangled, and making long pauses in painful effort to extricate his meaning. Jo was often sent to a water-mill in the woods with a grist, and while waiting for his wheat or corn to be ground, he regarded the machinery with the closest attention, and at length became impressed with the idea that after he had become a man, and whipped my father, he would like to follow milling for a business. The miller, an odd but kindly man of whom but little was known in our part of the country, admired Jo’s manly way, and made friends with him by good-naturedly answering his questions, and occasionally inviting him to his house for dinner; and Jo talked so much of his ambition and his friend, that he came to be called “The Miller,” and spent his spare time in making models, and trying them in the rivulets which ran through the fields after a rain.