you?"

"Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we
drove along, Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought
we'd stop and cheer him up. When we found him father said he'd
been dead a couple days. He'd tied a piece of binding twine round
his neck, made a noose in each end, fixed the nooses over the ends
of a bent stick, and let the stick spring straight; strangled
himself."

"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"

The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He
clapped little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly
as to kill himself at all, I should say!"

"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died
on him, didn't they?"

"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were
plenty of bogs left in the world, weren't there?"

"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any
good?" Eric asked, in astonishment.

"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's
hogs. He was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--
think of that, now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and
quite embarrassed little Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and
hands at the tin basin. While he was parting his wet hair at the