"But you told me there was not a chick or a child," she exclaimed in a rage.
For a moment he hesitated; then opening his mouth slowly, he gave voice to the single witticism of his life.
"That was befo' I married you, dearie," he said.
"Well, how am I to know," demanded the female, "that you haven't got a parcel of others hidden away?"
"Thar's one, the littlest, put out to nurse next do', an' another, the biggest, gone to work in the West," he returned in his amiable, childish manner.
After my unfortunate introduction, however, the addition of a greater and a lesser appeared to impress her but little. She looked scornfully about the disorderly room, took off her big, florid bonnet, and began arranging her hair before the three-cornered mottled mirror on the wall. Then wheeling round in a temper, her eyes fell on Samuel, sitting dejectedly on his tail by my mother's old blue and white gingham apron.
"What is that?" she fired straight into my father's face.
"That," he responded, offering his unnecessary information as if it were a piece of flattery, "air the dawg, Sukey."
"Whose dawg?"
Goaded into defiance by this attack on my only friend, I spoke in a shrill voice from the corner into which I had retreated. "Mine," I said.