“No,” I said; “this one is quite different. You will have no trouble in sleeping over this one, Ase.”
“That's a comfort. Got a little Bayport in it? Seems to me you ought to put a little Bayport in, for a change.”
I smiled. “There is a little in this,” I answered. “A little at the beginning, and, perhaps, at the end.”
“You don't say! You ain't got me in it, have you? I'd—I'd look kind of funny in a book, wouldn't I?”
I laughed, but I did not answer.
“Not that I ain't seen things in my life,” went on Asaph, hopefully. “A man can't be town clerk in a live town like this and not see things. But I hope you won't put any more foreigners in. This we're readin' now,” rapping the newspaper with his knuckles, “gives us all we want to know about foreigners. Just savages, they be, as you say, and nothin' more. I pity 'em.”
I laughed again.
“Asaph,” said I, “what would you say if I told you that the English and French—yes, and the Germans, too, though I haven't seen them at home as I have the others—were no more savages than we are?”
“I'd say you was crazy,” was the prompt answer.
“Well, I'm not. And you're not very complimentary. You're forgetting again. You forget that I married one of those savages.”