“‘Dead,’ he yells. ‘Never ben near it. Nor did I ’tend to hev every blame fool in the army mailin’ my letters nuther. Because you finds a man with my coat on, that hain’t no reason he’s me. I was gittin’ to the rear with orders ez lively ez a cricket an’ th’owed off that coat jest because it was warm runnin’.’
“‘Hen I seen what I’d done I grabs his arm, I was so excited, an’ cries, ‘Did she merry Silas Quincy?’
“‘It wasn’t your fault she didn’t,’ he sais, deliberate like, rollin’ up his sleeves. ‘I got home two days after the letter an’ stopped the weddin’ party on their way to church.’”
CHAPTER II.
The Spelling Bee.
The Chronic Loafer stretched his legs along the counter and rested his back comfortably against a pile of calicoes.
“I allus held,” he said, “that they hain’t no sech things ez a roarinborinallus. I know some sais they is ’lectric lights, but ’hen I seen that big un last night I sayd to my Missus, an’ I hol’ I’m right, I sayd that it was nawthin’ but the iron furnaces over the mo’ntain. Fer s’pose, ez the Teacher claims, they was lights at the North Pole—does you uns believe we could see ’em all that distance? Well now!”
He gazed impressively about the store. The Patriarch, the Miller and the G.A.R. Man were disposed to agree with him. The School Teacher was sarcastic.
“Where ignorance is bliss ’twere folly to be wise,” he said. He tilted back on two legs of his chair and adjusted his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, so that all eight of his long quivering fingers seemed to be pointing in scorn at the man on the counter.