“Jumbo, I fear you are an exaggerator.”
“Ah specs’ ah is, majah. I specs’ ah is, but you know dat zaggerators is bo’n and not made, lak potes.”
Then the laughter broke loose. The hillside echoed with it, and Jumbo, who deemed that he had been called a most complimentary term by the major, gazed from one to the other in a highly puzzled way.
“Reminds me of old Uncle Hank who keeps a grocery store near my uncle’s farm up in Vermont,” put in Hiram. “One night in the store they were talking about potato bugs. One old fellow said he had seen twenty potato bugs on one stalk.
“‘’Pshaw!’ said an old man named Abner Deene, ‘that’s nothing. Why, up in my potato patch they’ve eaten everything up and now when I go outdoors I kin see ’em sitting around the lot, on trees and fences, waitin’ fer me ter plant over ag’in.’
“Then it came the turn of an old fellow named Cyrus Harper. Cyrus laughed at Abner.
“‘Sittin’ roun’ on fences,’ he sniffed, ‘that’s nuffin’. Nuffin’ at all. Why whar I come from the potato bugs come right into the kitchen, open the oven doors and yank the red hot baking potatoes out of the stove.’
“My uncle hadn’t said a thing all this time, but now he struck in.
“‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘all these potato-bug stories don’t begin to compare with the breed they had down near Brattleboro, where I come from. Down there I used to clerk in Si Toner’s grocery and general store. Well, the potato bugs used to come into the store in the spring and look over Si’s books to see who’d been buying potato seed.’”
“Funny thing your uncle never met the wonderful rifle shot, Philander Potts,” said the professor musingly, after the laughter over Hiram’s yarn had subsided.