“I don’t know what he thought,” said Miss Scroggs, “but when I opened my Bible and turned to page fourteen there wasn’t any page fourteen in it. Page fourteen is part of the ‘Brief Foreword from the Translators to the Reader,’ so I thought maybe it had got lost and never been missed. So I took up another book. I took up Emerson’s Essays, Volume Two.”
“And what did you read?” asked Philo Gubb.
“Nothing,” said Miss Scroggs, “because I couldn’t. Page fourteen was tore out of the book. So I went through all my books, and every page fourteen was tore out of every book. There was only one book in the house that had a page fourteen left in it.”
“And what did that say?” asked Mr. Gubb.
“It said,” said Miss Petunia, “‘To one quart of flour add a cup of water, beat well, and add the beaten whites of two eggs.’”
“Did you do all that?” inquired Mr. Gubb.
“Well,” said Miss Petunia, “I didn’t see any harm in trying it, just to see what happened, so I did it.”
“And what happened?” asked Mr. Gubb.
“Nothing,” said Miss Petunia. “In a couple of days the water dried up and the dough got pasty and moulded, and I threw it out.”
“Just so!” said Philo Gubb. “You’d sort of expect it to get mouldy, but you wouldn’t call it threatening at the first look.”