After Sorrow had retired, we lighted our cigars, and turned to for a chat, if chat it can be called one, where I did most of the talking myself.
“Doctor,” said I, “I wish I had had more time to have examined your collection of minerals. I had no idea Nova Scotia could boast of such an infinite variety of them. You could have taught me more in conversation in five minutes than I could have learned by books in a month. You are a mineralogist, and I am sorry to say I ain’t, though every boarding-school miss now-a-days in our country consaits she is. They are up to trap at any rate, if nothing else, you may depend,” and I gave him a wink.
“Now don’t, Slick,” said he, “now don’t set me off, that’s a good fellow.”
“‘Mr Slick,’ said a young lady of about twelve years of age to me wunst, ‘do you know what gray wackey is? for I do.’
“‘Don’t I,’ sais I; ‘I know it to my cost. Lord! how my old master used to lay it on!’
“‘Lay it on!’ she said, ‘I thought it reposed on a primitive bed.’
“‘No it don’t,’ said I. ‘And if anybody knows what gray wackey is, I ought; but I don’t find it so easy to repose after it as you may. Gray means the gray birch rod, dear, and wackey means layin’ it on. We always called it gray whackey in school, when a feller was catching particular Moses.’
“‘Why, how ignorant you are!’ said she. ‘Do you know what them mining tarms, clinch, parting, and black bat means?’
“‘Why, in course I do!’ sais I; ‘clinch is marrying, parting is getting divorced, and black bat is where a fellow beats his wife black and blue.”
“‘Pooh!’ said she, ‘you don’t know nothing.’