He quite took it to heart and continued talking about it after school. He really seemed to believe that a great and dangerous delusion had gone abroad.
"It's wrong," he said, "puttin' sich stuff as that into young ones' heads. It didn't oughter be 'lowed!"
What old Zack was saying about the earth spread abroad and caused a great deal of amusement. Certain waggish persons began to "josh" him and others tried to argue with him, but all such attempts merely roused his native obstinacy. One Sunday evening he gave a somewhat wrong direction to the weekly prayer meeting by rising to warn the people that their children were being taught a pack of lies; and such was his vehemence that the regular Sabbath service resolved itself into a heated debate on the contour of the earth.
Perhaps old Zack believed that, as a recently educated man, it had become his duty to set things right in the public mind.
The day before school closed he went to his late antagonist, the lawyer on the school board, and again offered to pay the twenty dollars for his tuition. After formally expelling him from school, however, the board did not dare to accept the money, and old Zack gave it to the long-suffering Master Cobb.
CHAPTER VI
THE SAD ABUSE OF OLD MEHITABLE
About this time there occurred a domestic episode with which Halstead was imperishably connected in the family annals.
In those days the family butter was churned in the kitchen by hand power, and often laboriously, in an upright dasher churn which Addison and Theodora had christened Old Mehitable. The butter had been a long time coming one morning; but finally the cream which for an hour or more had been thick, white and mute beneath the dasher strokes began to swash in a peculiar way, giving forth after each stroke a sound that they thought resembled, Mehitable—Mehitable—Mehitable.