Indeed, he sacrificed his comfort willingly to enjoy the mental treat her angry eloquence afforded him. There had been times, however, when Kate's lessons had taken a more practical and infinitely less entertaining form. It was one of these which effected Bill's final reformation. The memory of it brought smiles to the lips of Ovidians, young or old, whenever they met Bill.
With all good managers in Ovid, it is the custom to salt down a small barrel of herrings in autumn. These they buy from their fisherman neighbours for a dollar per hundred. Now Kate, who was certainly, as even her enemies admitted, a forehanded woman, sent Bill with a silver dollar, to get her a hundred herrings, one day when the proper season came around. With this Bill duly proceeded to the fishermen, paid his dollar and got his herrings. As he turned to go, Sam Turner shouted an invitation to him to come down at night and have a share of the beer which was to be on tap at the Upper Fishing Station. Bill assented and went his way.
After his six o'clock supper, he told Kate he was going to get his saw sharpened at the blacksmith shop, and so set out. He left the saw at the blacksmith's, then smartened his pace along the street, down the steep incline to the river's edge, carefully along the river path until he disappeared into the fisherman's little hut.
The door was closed, then Bill, Sam Turner, and some half-dozen others gathered round the keg of smuggled beer, and all went merry as the traditional wedding bell.
About half-past eleven, Bill and the others emerged. The cask was empty—their condition the antithesis of the cask's. Lurching, stumbling, falling, sliding along the river path; scrambling, crawling, climbing up the banks to the level, then along the street to Bill's home. All this took time, and it was the hour when ghosts do walk ere they neared Bill's door. A dim light gleamed in the window. "Beacon tha' lights me home, boys," said Bill, who, having passed the transitory phases of moroseness and pugnaciousness, to the higher state of tears and courage, had now reached the acme of sentiment and drunkenness simultaneously, and was ready, as he expressed several times on the way up the bank in a voice which came from different attitudes, as the speaker stood upright, crept, or lay flat, "To kish Kate and fight for the country b'gosh." Bill and his friends approached the door. Bill gently tried it. It was locked, so Bill said. They each tried it in turn, and each pronounced it locked in a voice betokening a strange and new discovery. They each knocked in turn—silence. They each kicked in turn—silence. Then Bill said in a lordly way, "Kate, open the door!" adding in an aside to his fellows, "I'll forgive her, kish her, make her happy." Then again, "Kate, open the door!"
Kate did open the door, with such abrupt and unexpected suddenness that Bill, standing before it, balanced back on his heels and raised his outspread hands. His confreres were preparing to make back-stays of themselves to brace Bill up, when Kate's hand and arm reached forth, and, with one single movement, as Sam Turner afterwards graphically described her action, "yanked" Bill into the house and slammed the door.
There was silence for a moment, followed by a slow sliding sound. His late companions surrounded the two uncurtained windows and prepared to watch events.
Bill had slowly slid down, until he was now in a sitting posture on the floor, with his back against the door. Kate had vanished; she soon entered from the back of the house bringing two pails of water, with which she proceeded deliberately to give Bill a cold bath. Bill said several times in a weak voice, "Kish me, Kate," but Kate, preserving an admirable silence, continued the deluge until Bill, with some show of sobriety and nimbleness, arose. By this time the water was pouring out beneath the door, and the watchers outside were shivering sympathetically. As Bill rose, he certainly looked miserable enough to excite pity, even in Kate's heart; but the worst was not yet.
Disregarding the water streaming on the floor, Kate proceeded to arrange two chairs, with an accompaniment of cloths, knives, salt, and a small keg. Lastly, she produced two baskets of herrings. It was now evident to the horrified watchers that her dire purpose was to make Bill clean, wash, and salt down the hundred herrings then and there. And such was the case. The watchers stayed until eyes and limbs were weary, and then crept away awe-struck at the terrors of matrimony, and deeply impressed by Kate's moral supremacy.
And Bill worked and worked. His hand was unsteady, and his blood flowed freely from numerous cuts to mingle with the herrings. He scraped and scraped, and bedaubed himself with scales. He salted and salted, and the salt bit his many cuts. But Kate was inexorable. Every herring was cleaned, scaled, washed, salted and packed, and the débris thoroughly cleaned up before the miserable, white-faced, repentant Bill was allowed to rest, and during it all Kate talked and talked and talked. From that night Bill was a changed man, and his admiration for Kate became more than ever pronounced.