Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 34, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 August 1895 — Two Frightened Boys. [ARTICLE]

Two Frightened Boys.

Some forty years ago W. C. Howells was an Ohio boy a dozen years old, and had often to go on horseback to a distant grist-mill to get the family wheat ground. The weather was flue, he says, and the roads good, and along the way were plenty of apples and nuts, so that such expeditious were almost in the nature of picnics. But by and by the cold weather came on. I was often benighted in getting home, when I had to run the gauntlet of various terrors —a graveyard or two, with stories of ghosts and goblins fresh in my memory, besides a story, vouched for by several big boys, that a panther had been heard screeching in the woods and laurel thickets. One night my brother Tom and I had been to town together, riding double on Paddy. When we reached the top of Sugar Hill, we had to get off and walk down, as it was too steep for both to ride down in the dark, and we were ih danger of slipping over the horse’s bead.

It was a frosty autumn night, and the saddle had got very cold while we were off, so that neither of us wanted to sit on It, preferring the horse’s warm back. We drew Paddy up by a big log that we could just find in the starlight, and instead of getting upon him—while standing on the log—we opened an argument as to which should ride behind. The panther story was usually present with us, but we had forgotten it jnst then, and we grew pretty loud in our dispute, when, as Burns says, something “gat up and, £ie a croon,” or, more properly, a yell, hot very for from us. i ■ It was an owl, as I now suppose, but then it was a panther. . The argument dropped in a second, Tom vaulted into the saddle, as the place of safety, and I took the warm seat behind, with all

the dangers of an additional passenger uninvited. “Short and few were the prayers we said,” and Paddy was put to his best paces up the creek, which we had to cross five times; but at the first crossing he persisted in drinking, regardless of all the terrors of our situation. Women are demanding more of husbands every day, and men are marrying less. After a while children will bar# to be Taised In inouMtors.