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county seat, and occupied his time with wandering about 

 the neighborhood hunting and fishing. He was very select 

 in forming new acquaintances, hardly ever going beyond 

 the circle of old friends. 



He dubbed me Compo, always insisting I was the 

 nephew of an Indian chief with whom he had hunted in 

 the then distant prairies of the -far West. At times he 

 was rational, and it was well worth while to listen to his 

 vagaries when the hallucination was upon him, till the 

 interval of sanity, as then his conversation would be of 

 great interest, and he would vividly sketch scenes that 

 had occurred in his eventful life. When the cloud was 

 away, I never listened to a person who could more com- 

 pletely absorb the attention of his hearers ; and incidents 

 of foreign travel, and adventures by sea and land, would 

 be portrayed so graphically that they seemed as if actually 

 occurring. When he discoursed of the great men of the 

 world being personally acquainted with many of them 

 he showed an acuteness of penetration in discerning traits 

 of character, hidden to an ordinary observer, placing the 

 characters he was describing generally in a more favorable 

 light ; and in talking of celebrated poets, he would dis- 

 cover beauties hitherto overlooked, and he would demon- 

 strate his opinions with quotations that showed his inti- 

 mate knowledge of all their writings. I have listened 

 with admiration to his conversation for hours, as he went 

 over the field of polite literature, giving me ideas that 

 greatly enhanced the pleasure of reading ; or he would 

 entertain me with stories of other countries, elucidating 

 life and habit better than I ever saw it done in books. He 

 would vary this by showing me how to tie the fly that 

 was best adapted for fishing in different waters, explain 

 some intricate problem at chess, set up the rare birds and 

 animals that we would kill in our hunting-trips, his knowl- 

 edge of ornithology and taxidermy being second only to 



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