Sez he, with about as much agin dignity as he had used before:
“You can comment on the size of my mind all you want to, but you will probable think different about the heft of it before I get through with the skeme I am jest about to embark on.”
And he waved the towel some like a banner and wiped his whiskers out in a aggressive way, and stood up his few hairs over his foretop in a sort of a helmet way, and I see by his axent and demeanors that he really wuz in earnest about sunthin’ or other, and I beset him to tell me what it wuz. For I am deathly afraid of his plans, and have been for some time.
But he wouldn’t tell me for quite a spell. But at last as he opened the chamber-door for a minute, and the grateful odor of the rich coffee and the tender, brown steak come up from below, and wuz wafted into his brain and gently stimulated it, he sort o’ melted down and told me all about it.
He wanted to jine the Pan American Congress as a delegate and a worker.
Sez he, “Samantha, I want to go and be a Pan American. I want to like a dog.”
“What for?” sez I. “What do you want to embark into this enterprise for, Josiah Allen?”
“Wall,” sez he, “I will tell you what for. I want to enter into this project because I am fitted for it,” sez he, “I have got the intellect for it, and I have got the pans.”
Wall, I see there wuz some truth in this latter statement. For the spring before, nuthin’ to do but Josiah had to go and get pans instead of pails to use in a new strip of sugar bush we had bought on.
I wanted him not to, but he wouldn’t give in. And of course they wuz so onhandy he couldn’t use ’em much of any, and there we wuz left with our pans on our hands—immense ones, fourteen-quart pans. The idee!