The turning of the worm was so unexpected that the widow leaned back in her chair, and there ensued a silence only broken when the minister of the local Bethesda groaned. For the Reverend Mr. Pooker, with his wife and daughter, were frequently guests at Sarah’s board, the widow, nominally a member of the Established Church, having seceded to Dissent, liking her religion as she liked her tea, hot and strong, and without sugar.
“I think you spoke, young man?” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker, setting down the pot of rhubarb jam into which he had been diving, and staring solemnly at Josh. Mrs. Pooker faithfully reproduced the stare, and little Miss Pooker tried to do so, but only managed to look at the presumptuous youth with her little canary-colored head tilted on one side in an admiring manner. Not being sufficiently regenerate and elect to be insensible to the dreadful fascination of wickedness.
“I did speak!” asserted young Josh, boldly meeting the black eyes that flamed upon him out of the deep hollows under his mother’s high narrow brow. “I said, ‘As if I could help it!’ and I say so again.... Were there no teapots handy? A teapot wouldn’t ha’ pitched itself in a child’s face years after he’s earned the right, Lord knows! to call himself a man.”
“Scoffer!” thundered the great bass voice of the little flat-chested woman. “Mocker! As though I, Sarah Horrotian, would disobey the command that bids a woman suckle her children!”
“Well and nobly said, ma’am!” commented the Reverend Pooker, reaching for the seed-cake. “And let us hope that the respect and gratitood owed by a child so nerrished to a parent——”
“And such a parent!” interpolated Mrs. Pooker tenderly.
“Will not be forgotten,” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker through the intervening medium of seed-cake, “by this misgeided and onrewly Young Man!”
“Very well, then!” said Josh, driven beyond patience. “All right! But why be I to thank her for doing what the Lord commanded her to do? That’s what I want to know!”
Sarah Horrotian rose up at the tea-board end of the Pembroke table in the best parlor.