So, it will be seen, I was not getting on at all with my love-affair.
It is pretty presumptuous in me to refer to it as a love-affair. That would intimate—calling it that—a bit of reciprocation on the part of Celene Kingsley. But she never showed any visible interest in me, even to looking my way when she met me on the street. I would have liked to attract her attention, for at last I wore shoes and had clothes without patches on them.
The Skokums flourished under cover of the night.
There was Oramandel Bangs. He was rather simple, and always carried his mouth open, and nobody in Levant ever forgot that once a hornet flew in and stung his tongue and it swelled and stuck out of his mouth for days like the end of a bologna sausage.
Oramandel had a sneaking suspicion that witchcraft had never been wholly stamped out by his forefathers in New England.
We decided to convince him that he was right—there’s nothing like clinching a man’s faith in the good judgment of his ancestors.
We hoisted one of his calves into an apple-tree. He “unwitched” the animal by cutting off its ears and tail before taking it down from the tree.
We tied cords to his ox-chains and hid ourselves and slashed the chains about the dooryard; he ran to the neighbors and reported that the witches had changed his chains into big snakes. We did a lot more things, and then imagination began to do the rest for him. He said the witches wouldn’t allow him to do his farm-work, even though he had sumac-wood splinters in all his tools and stuck shears around his chum to make the butter come. Before we realized what mischief a lively imagination can do to a man, they were obliged to carry the old chap away to the asylum for the insane.
And again Judge Kingsley held forth in the post-office. I guess he did a lot of talking at home, too.
At any rate, Celene Kingsley was mighty well posted, so I discovered.