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certain that if there were, the victims of our rural electrification project would still be holding the record.
    I entered the first grade of school in this town, and shortly thereafter I had reason to complain to my two cousins that my teacher was picking on me. The good youths were seriously disturbed—or seemed to be. We retired to the loft of Newt’s barn to confer. There, after we had all had a good chew of tobacco and a swig from a purloined bottle of wine, they reached a decision.
    My teacher, they advised me, was suffering from a malady known as horniness. She “wanted some but didn’t know how to get it.” It was their suggestion that I linger in the schoolroom after the class had gone and jab her “where she lived.” This would show her that I was a “pretty gay guy” and my troubles would be well on the way toward their solution.
    Well, I had seen just enough of the mating antics of farm animals to accept this scheme as entirely plausible. I became so enthusiastic, in fact, that my cousins began to believe in the stunt. They fell for their own rib as hard as I had. Excitedly—and no longer joking—they repeated their instructions, adding a message for me to pass on to the teacher. I was to tell her that they were rarin’ to go, any time and place she suggested, that they would undertake to do their best for her and she would leave the trysting place relaxed and rejoicing.
    That was not the exact message, but it conveys the general idea. The words my cousins used, while considerably more graphic, were somewhat less polite.
    So I trotted off for school the next morning, silently rehearsing the scene I was about to play—convinced that happier days were just ahead. True to my instructions, I lingered behind at recess time. When I at last started out the door where the teacher was waiting impatiently, I triggered my forefinger and jabbed. Then, having proved I was a “gay guy,” I started to deliver my cousins’ message.
    I didn’t get as much as a word of it out before the teacher, an apple-cheeked German girl, affixed her hand to my ear and hauled me squawling toward the principal’s office.
    I was saved from I don’t know what unpleasantness by two circumstances. First, the teacher’s sense of delicacy prevented her from more than hinting at the nature of my crime. The strongest indictment that the principal could evince from her was the statement that I had been “pranking nasty.” Secondly, this principal, like many another person in the town, was in the financial clutches of my Uncle Bob and was reluctant to offend him—as he felt he would—by punishing me.
    So he gave me a mild talking-to, after the teacher had been sent on her way, plus a pat on the head and the suggestion that I pattern my conduct, in the future, after “that splendid uncle of yours.” Then, I was dismissed to the playgrounds. I looked up my two cousins, forthwith, and charged them with giving me some very bad advice. They, having lost much of their previous day’s enthusiasm, were vastly relieved to learn that I had not involved them, and they readily acquiesced to my demand that I give each a “swift kick in the arse.” Thus, the matter ended.
    Whether my teacher was any kinder to me thereafter, I don’t remember—probably she had been kind enough in the first place. I do recall that never again did she come within my reach. She was no fool, even if I was.
    These cousins of mine operated under a peculiar code of logic which, although it seemed entirely clear and sensible to them, was as maddening as it was incomprehensible to the outside world. Even I, a sympathetic participant in most of their stunts, was baffled and bewildered by them more often than not.
    One spring, when the boys had foresworn crime for several months—and there was a growing feeling that they might escape death by hanging, ending their existence with nothing worse, perhaps, than life imprisonment—their delighted families presented each