"Yes, if I can. We have had a love-feast at Teackle Hall this morning, and your sister from Talbot is down, but I think I can get off."
"Lord sakes!" Rhoda said, looking at Mr. Tilghman candidly; "you ain't a minister now? Not a minister of the Gospil?"
"Unworthily so, Miss Rhoda."
"Well, I don't see how you was old enough to be convicted and learn it all, unless you was a speretual merikle. Misc Somers see one of 'em at Jinkotig. They called him the enfant phrenomeny. He exhorted at five year old, and at seven give his experyins."
"Rare, Miss Rhoda," the rector said, hardly able to keep his reverence in amusement at her impetuosity.
"Oh, he made a wild excitemins, Aunt Vesty. The women give each other their babies to hold while they tuk turns a-shouting. 'Yer, Becky, hold my baby while I shout!' says one. 'Now, Nancy, hold mine while I shout!' To see that little boy up thar tellin' of his experyins was meriklus, an' made an excitemins like the high tides on Jinkotig that drowns' em out. But, Aunt Vesty, that little phrenomeny was a dwarf, twenty year old, an' Misc Somers found it out and told about it."
"I'll be bound Mrs. Somers knows!" exclaimed the Judge.
"That she do," continued Rhoda, earnestly, with a slight sniffle of a well-modelled nose and a dimpling that argued to Vesta something to come. "Misc Somers says you held one of them babies, Jedge, to let its mother shout, and pretended to be under a conviction; an' that you backslid right thar and was a-whisperin' to the other mother. Lord sakes! Misc Somers finds it all out."
"Well," said the Judge, finding the laugh against him, "I never did better electioneering than that day. By holding that baby five minutes I made a vote, and the mother will hold it twenty years before she will make a vote."
"Misc Somers says, Jedge, you hold the women longer than thar babies; but I told her you was in sech conviction you didn't know one from the other. 'Oh,' she says, 'he's sly and safe when he gits over yer on the Worcester side.' Misc Somers, she's dreadful plain."