“Well, but what is it?”
“Don’t you know? Hark!”
Even Mrs. Beckwith began to lose patience with what seemed to her ill-timed mirth, and replied with conviction, “Of course we do not know or we should have disturbed nobody to inform us.”
“Your pardon, ma’am. I really s’pose you don’t know, bein’ brought up in the city, so to speak. Well, ma’am, my opinion o’ them sounds is: what master would call mephitis, what common folks name—skunks.”
Nobody said anything for a moment; and seeing the look of astonishment upon the faces about him, as well as hearing the “thump, thump,” continued, Mr. Dolloway explained: “The mephitis—I learn my names from Mr. Brook, because he says the other ones are ‘local,’ an’ not spoke everywhere,—the mephitis is a burrowin’ animal. They was a nest of snakes woke up in the hen-yard, Miss Brook told me this morning, and they’s a nest of the other fellows woke up under your door-sill, or, maybe, under that big flat stun used for a step. The noise is made by their tails a flap-flap-flapping against the hard ground or sunthin’. They won’t do any harm there till morning, and then I’ll get the men to have ’em rousted out. They’ll have to be shot; an’ now you all might as well go to bed again.”
“Will not you go upstairs, too, Mr. Dolloway? There is an extra room, you know; and I should feel proud to be able to entertain anybody over night, after having to economize space as I did in our ‘flat.’”
The guest consented, and everybody was soon asleep, satisfied that Mr. Dolloway’s explanation was probably the correct one, unromantic as it proved to be.
“To think my ‘haunt’ turned out to be so perfectly horrid! It’s cured me of superstition, anyway!” sighed Beatrice, as she kissed her mother good-night. “One by one my dreams forsake me; one by one—”
“You’d best get to bed as soon as possible.”
“Oh, Motherkin! not even poetry allowed?”