Book Description:
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IH But I began to tell you how Ellen McGee and I invented Snockerty and arrived at our first contact with organized society, at least Forrie and Effie and I did, for it led to our being interdicted the society of the McGee children for so long that we forgot to inquire what inconvenience, if any, they suffered on account of it. You will see for yourself that Ellen must have invented him where, indeed, should a saint abhorring, Sunday schooled Taylorville child get the stuff for it? God we knew, and were greatly bored by His inordinate partiality for the Jews as against all ancient peoples, and by the inquisitorial eye and ear forever at the keyhole of our lives, as Cousin Judd never spared to remind us; and personally I was convinced of a large friendliness brooding over Hadley's pasture, to the sense of which I woke every morning afresh, was called by it, and to it; walking apart from the others, I vaguely prayed. But Snockerty was of the stripe of trolls, leprechauns, pucks, and hobgoblins. We began, I remember, by thinking of him as resident in an old hollow apple tree, down which, if small trifles were dropped, they fell out of reach andsound. There was the inviting hole, arm high in the apple trunk, into which you popped bright pebbles, bits of glass and I suppose He might have sprung very naturally from the need of justifying your having parted with something you valued and couldn't get back again, at the prompting of an impulse you did not understand. Very presently the practice grew into the acknowledgment of a personality amenable to our desires. We took to dropping small belongings in the tree for an omen of the day: whether the spring was full or not, or if we should find any pawpaws in the wood, and drew the augury from anything that happened i...
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