“Reely for you, I guess!” and he opened the large brown paper bag and drew from it the remains of a water-soaked hat!
They WERE remains, but there was no doubt of their nature and substance. They had clearly been a hat in the past, and one could even suppose that, when resuscitated, they might again assume their original form in some near and happy future.
Miss Miranda, full of curiosity, joined the group in the side entry at this dramatic moment.
“Well, I never!” she exclaimed. “Where, and how under the canopy, did you ever?”
“I was working on the dam at Union Falls yesterday,” chuckled Abijah, with a pleased glance at each of the trio in turn, “an' I seen this little bunnit skippin' over the water jest as Becky does over the road. It's shaped kind o' like a boat, an' gorry, ef it wa'nt sailin' jest like a boat! Where hev I seen that kind of a bristlin' plume?' thinks I.”
(“Where indeed!” thought Rebecca stormily.)
“Then it come to me that I'd drove that plume to school and drove it to meetin' and drove it to the Fair an'drove it most everywheres on Becky. So I reached out a pole an' ketched it fore it got in amongst the logs an' come to any damage, an' here it is! The hat's passed in its checks, I guess; looks kind as if a wet elephant had stepped on it; but the plume's bout's good as new! I reely fetched the hat beck for the sake o' the plume.”
“It was real good of you, 'Bijah, an' we're all of us obliged to you,” said Miranda, as she poised the hat on one hand and turned it slowly with the other.
“Well, I do say,” she exclaimed, “and I guess I've said it before, that of all the wearing' plumes that ever I see, that one's the wearin'est! Seems though it just wouldn't give up. Look at the way it's held Mis' Cobb's dye; it's about as brown's when it went int' the water.”
“Dyed, but not a mite dead,” grinned Abijah, who was somewhat celebrated for his puns.