a very different object.

"Second best!" reiterated I, with an air of despondency, as the company
turned from the target to me. "Second best, only? Here, Billy, my son,
take the old Soap-stick; she's a good piece, but I'm getting too old and
dim-sighted to shoot a rifle, especially with the drop-sight and double
wabbles."

"Why, good Lord a'mighty!" said Billy, with a look that baffles all
description, "an't you _driv_ the cross?"

"Oh, driv the cross!" rejoined I, carelessly. "What's that! Just look
where my ball is! I do believe in my soul its center is a full quarter
of an inch from the cross. I wanted to lay the center of the bullet upon
the cross, just as if you'd put it there with your fingers."

Several received this palaver with a contemptuous but very appropriate
curl of the nose; and Mealy Whitecotton offered to bet a half pint "that
I couldn't do the like again with no sort o' wabbles, he didn't care
what." But I had already fortified myself on this quarter of my
morality. A decided majority, however, were clearly of opinion that I
was serious; and they regarded me as one of the wonders of the world.
Billy increased the majority by now coming out fully with my history, as
he had received it from his father; to which I listened with quite as
much astonishment as any other one of his hearers. He begged me to go
home with him for the night, or, as he expressed it, "to go home with
him and swap lies that night, and it shouldn't cost me a cent;" the true
reading of which is, that if I would go home with him, and give him the
pleasure of an evening's chat about old times, his house should be as
free to me as my own. But I could not accept his hospitality without