The Unluckiest Woodcutter in Mason County

I saw an exhibition of what you might call luck, the other day, up in Mason County. I was up there on business last week, near Harpersfield. My friend and I came to a couple of men chopping in the woods. One man kept on chopping, but he had made not two or three strokes with his saw when it flew off the handle. The sharp blade whizzed through the air, fell close to my friend's head, and striking the other chopper, whose name was Hagar, cut his nose off close to his face as clean as if it had been done with a razor. The man who had been hit looked at his severed nose as if he could hardly believe his eyes. When the full force of the blow struck him, he looked at his fellow chopper with an expression of surprise and deep injury upon his face, and shouted, 'Well, Jack, you're a damn nice fellow, ain't you?' Hagar then stooped and picked up his nose and, pressing his handkerchief to his bleeding face, astonished both my friend and myself by resuming the subject upon which they had been talking, which was the making of a contract for tree chopping, as if nothing occurrence had occurred to interrupt it. My friend, however, started the other chap to the village after a doctor, and told him to take Hagar home at once. Hagar wouldn't hear to this, and said he would cut across to his cabin through the woods and wait for the doctor. When we returned at night we went two miles to inquire at Mr. Hagar's cabin. We found him chopping wood in front of the cabin. There was a bandage around his face. When we asked him if the doctor had seen him, he said, 'He is a busy man. He told the boys to put the nose back in place and stick it there, and said he believed it would grow on, as he had known of such cases happening before. I haven't bled much since the day of the accident.' Hagar then finished up some sticks of wood as if nothing had happened at all.