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have explored from the Pacific up the Columbia River, across the Rocky Mountains, and thence overland to St. Louis and the United States. Whoever conveys him safely home, or into the care of his nephew, Ticonderoga Kinneson, shall have 5 dollars from
T HE K INNESON F AMILY
K INGDOM C OMMON , V ERMONT
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    S O READ the fifty handbills I had printed up the night before to distribute in the way stations between Vermont and Boston and, should I not overtake my uncle sooner, in the principal places of that city.
    As matters turned out, I had no trouble tracing my quarry over the White Mountains into New Hampshire, and then on to Boston, since he had made a highly favorable impression in all the taverns, post offices, and inns where his coach had stopped, because of his freehanded generosity and his general good-humoredness. For as he had often told me, citing Homer, a “cheerful man does best in every enterprise.” And my uncle maintained the most cheerful demeanor at all times.
    By traveling day and night and sleeping in the coach, I arrived in Boston just three days after leaving Vermont. After distributing a few of my remaining handbills around the harbor, which delighted me with its forest of ships’ masts, penetrating odors of tar, salt, and fish, and sailors of every hue speaking all kinds of lingos, I started up into the city proper. On the way I came upon a general hubbub, in which I found my uncle himself, in all his outlandish regalia, directing a gang of street urchins in the defense of a knoll he imagined to be Bunker Hill and pelting with snowballs anyone who attempted to come up the street.
    â€œGood morning, Ti!” said the private, tossing me two or three snowballs as though we were at home in our dooryard and he had never run away at all. “For the love of freedom and your nation, take the east flank and don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”
    Until now, I had supposed that my uncle might curb his little ways and stays once he was away from Vermont. Indeed, the opposite appeared to be true. “Attack, boys,” he roared. “For Vermont and Ethan Allen!” I attempted to hustle him away into a tangle of steep little side streets, on the pretext of reinforcing a badly outmanned American garrison. But he instantly smoked out my ruse and took to his heels, calling, “Hi! Hi! Catch me if you can,” with the tail of his jingling stocking cap, like the belled tail of a kite, flying out of sight around corners. Suddenly I thought of my stash of cartwheel cookies. Rummaging in my bag, I held one up. “Private Kinneson,” I shouted, “the British have been driven back into the sea. It’s mess time.”
    He stopped and whirled around atop a snowy rise on the city common, above a frozen pond; and I sailed the big ginger cookie toward him like a twirling plate. To my amazement, he raised his arquebus and, training the muzzle on the flying confection as if it were a flushing partridge, blew it into a thousand pieces.
    Immediately following this exhibition, my uncle and I had a long laugh that cleared the air between us. Then we sat on a bench near the pond, sharing my mother’s cookies with some mangy-looking doves and some young skaters; and my uncle said that he was glad to see me, heartily glad, for he had missed me terribly over the past several days, adding that he had already hired the Beacon Street Lyceum for a lecture he would give that very night on our trip from the Pacific, as a means of raising a stake for our upcoming expedition.
    He then rented a pair of wooden skates from a Dutchman in a little covered cart pulled by a blind pony and ventured out onto the ice to play at snap-the-whip with the children. It seemed to me that until I could contrive some stratagem to get him home, the better part of wisdom might be to join him in this exhilarating activity. So we spent the next two or three hours whooping and chasing each other