"Dad told you t' come here 'nd stay t' supper, did he? What's come over him?" said the girl, with a sort of audacious humor.
"Dad has an awful grutch agin preachers," said Mrs. Bacon, as she wiped her hands on her apron. "I declare, I don't see how"——
"Some preachers, not all preachers," laughed Pill, in his mellow nasal. "There are preachers, and then again preachers. I'm one o' the t'other kind."
"I sh'd think y' was," laughed the girl.
"Now, Merry Etty, you run right t' the pig-pen with that milk, whilst I go in an' set the tea on."
Mr. Pill seized the can of milk, saying, with a twang: "Show me the way that I may walk therein," and, accompanied by the laughing girl, made rapid way to the pig-pen just as the old man set up a ferocious shout to call the hired hand out of the cornfield.
"How'd y' come to send him here?" asked Mrs. Bacon, nodding toward Pill.
"Damfino! I kind o' liked him—no nonsense about him," answered Bacon, going into temporary eclipse behind his hands as he washed his face at the cistern.
At the supper table Pill was "easy as an old shoe," ate with his knife, talked on fatting hogs, suggested a few points on raising clover, told of pioneer experiences in Michigan, and soon won them—hired man and all—to a most favorable opinion of himself. But he did not trench on religious matters at all.
The hired man in his shirt-sleeves, and smelling frightfully of tobacco and sweat (as did Bacon), sat with open month, at times forgetting to eat, in his absorbing interest in the minister's yarns.