“Wha’ gib you de notion ob dat?”
“Sh’o, a sheep puts his wool on his favourite places,” Mrs. Mouth returned, reshuffling slowly her pack.
Awakened by her Father’s psalms, Edna’s “What would you do’s” had commenced with volubility anew, growing more eerie with the gathering night.
“... if a Wood-Spirit wid two heads an’ six arms, were to take hold ob you, Miami, from behind?”
“I no do nothin’ at all,” Miami answered briefly.
“Talk not so much ob de jumbies, Chile, as de chickens go to roost!” Mrs. Mouth admonished.
“Or, if de debil himself should?” Edna insisted, allowing Snowball, the cat, to climb on to her knee.
“Nothin’, sh’o,” Miami murmured, regarding dreamily the sun’s sinking disk, that was illuminating all the Western sky with incarnadine and flamingo-rose. Ominous in the falling dusk, the savannah rolled away, its radiant hues effaced beneath a rapid tide of deepening shadow.
“Start de gramophone gwine girls, an’ gib us somet’in’ bright!” Mrs. Mouth exclaimed, depressed by the forlorn note the Twa-oo-Twa-oo bird, that mingled its lament with a thousand night cries from the grass.
“When de saucy female sing: ‘My Ice Cream Girl,’ fo’ sh’o she scare de elves.”