But, poor Humpy! his little troubled day of life was almost done.
"Hog-killing time" had come, and great kettles of water were kept constantly over the kitchen fire, to be heated for scalding the animals after they were killed. As Horace and Tom were lifting one of these off, it slipped and tilted over, pouring more than a gallon of the boiling contents right into Humpy's bed, which, owing to the busy tumult of the day, I suppose, had not been moved away.
The poor little fellow was just taking his morning nap.--I will spare you and myself pain, by telling the rest as briefly as possible.
In a few minutes the whole household had collected in the kitchen. Horace had wrapped the little fellow in a blanket, but I saw my father shake his head as he looked at him, and taking Horace aside, whisper something to him, to which the tender-hearted old man answered aloud,--
"No, Mass' B---- don't ax ole Horace to do dat ar, 'cause he couldn't, no how."
Father then called Tom and whispered to him, and afterwards to my mother, who took me softly by the hand and asked me to come with her to the sitting-room, where she explained to me that Humpy was too badly hurt this time to get well, and told me what father had whispered to Tom.
She had hardly finished, when I heard the crack of the pistol in the direction of the barn,--it almost seemed to me that the ball had gone through _my_ heart.
Horace laid my little dead pet in the old box of wool, nailed it up, and we buried him with all the household by, at the foot of the garden, under a sickle pear tree, the fruit of which _he_ had liked best.
After Walter and I went away from home, a great change came over Horace; he grew silent and reserved, and liked to be alone a great deal, and finally, with his savings, he bought a small tract of land, on the top of one of the highest hills in the neighborhood, where he built himself a little house and kept a great many goats. One morning one of his nearest neighbors, on going out, found some ten or fifteen goats at his door, bleating most piteously. Knowing that nobody thereabouts kept goats but Horace, and suspecting that something was wrong, he called one of his men and started over to Horace's house. When they got there, they found Horace lying on his bed, his hands folded peacefully across his breast--dead.