After a few minutes' more conversation, she hurried back to wash her dishes and get dinner.
When Sam came to dinner he found his wife in the best of spirits, with a big dinner for him to enjoy. Sam's alimentive faculty being in a state of great activity, he ate heartily, finishing up with two pieces of Sarah's extra rich peach cobbler. After dinner Sam went to the fire-place where he sat rocking himself, and soon was enjoying a smoke. He had been smoking about five minutes when his wife said: "I really like the smell of the tobacco you smoke, but if you were to smoke such stinking stuff as Horace does, I would get up and leave you. But yours does smell real sweet."
"Horace Green is too stingy to smoke good tobacco," said Sam, after which remark he brought his hand to the side of his leg each time he let the smoke curl out of his mouth, feeling well satisfied with himself and all the world beside.
Did you ever have the experience of passing through a large barnyard, and going from one end to the other with a lean, hungry hog after you, yelling and squealing, trying to eat you up by snapping first at one of your legs and then at the other? You kick at him with first one foot, saying, "Sooy, sooy;" then you, with the other foot, kick backwards, saying, "Sooy, sooy." And after going through this performance many, many times, you reach the gate and shut it between yourself and the hog, leaving him on the inside, amidst deafening noise made by his hungry squeals. After you have left, he does his best to tear down the fence, so strong are the pangs of hunger in him.
A few minutes after that you take him a pail of rich buttermilk, then a large pail of fresh ripe figs, and two dozen ears of sweet corn. You go out in that barnyard an hour afterwards and you don't hear any hog noise. You don't see a hog even moving, for he is lying down in the greatest state of quiet. He will let you do just what you have a mind to do to him. You can scratch him and you will find him good-natured and he seems to enjoy your attentions. He is in such a contented, happy state, that you can roll him or do anything you wish to him.
So it is with some men. By making love to them through their stomachs, you will find them in as happy a frame of mind as Sam Gilmore was as he finished his pipe. His wife saw that he was taking his last puffs, so she said, "Sam, can I have the bays to go over to the Henshaws' this afternoon?"
"Well," replied Sam, "I was going to haul wood, but I guess I can let that go. What time do you want them?"
"Two o'clock," said his wife.
Sarah said that Sam brought the bays around to the front door and was as lively round her and the team as he was twenty years ago when she was a maiden and he came courting her at her father's.
Talk about the diplomacy of Bismarck, d'Israeli, and the Russian Ambassador in settling the Eastern question at the close of the Russo-Turkish war; why there are women in Orangeville who can give them pointers on diplomacy.