I threw it.
“Well, they can have mine,” observed Miss H——, sniffing gingerly.
“What do you know about that?” exclaimed Speed, who was sitting some distance from the rest of us and consuming his share. “I think the man that sold you those ought to be taken out and slapped gently,” and he threw his away. “Say! And four of them all at once too. I’d just like to get a camera and photograph him. He’s a bird, he is.”
There was something amazingly comic to me in the very sound of Speed’s voice. I cannot indicate just what, but his attempt at scorn was so inadequate, so childlike.
“Well, anyhow, the fishes won’t mind,” I said. “They like nice, fresh Franklin eggs. Franklin is their best friend, aren’t you, Franklin? You love fishes, don’t you?”
Booth sat there, his esoteric faith in the wellbeing of everything permitting him to smile a gentle, tolerant smile.
“You know, I wondered why those two fellows seemed to smile at me,” he finally commented. “They must have done this on purpose.”
“Oh no,” I replied, “not to a full fledged Christian Scientist! Never! These eggs must be perfect. The error is with us. We have thought bad eggs, that’s all.”
We got up and tossed the empty beer bottles into the stream, trying to sink them with stones. I think I added one hundred stones to the bed of the river without sinking a single bottle. Speed threw in a rock pretending it was a bottle and I even threw at that before discovering my mistake. Finally we climbed into our car and sped onward, new joys always glimmering in the distance.
“Just to think,” I said to myself, “there are to be two whole weeks of this in this glorious August weather. What lovely things we shall see!”