Hannah ran down to the cellar and returned with a quart mug of cider. Josh put it to his lips and took a heavy pull. It was what the farmers call hard cider, and Josh verily feared his eyes would start out of his head while he was drinking it, but after several desperate gulps he succeeded in draining the mug. Then pulling a blue and white check handkerchief from his pocket, he rubbed his face very hard, and looked straight into the fire.
But in a few minutes he found his spirits wonderfully rising; he lifted up his eyes, hitched his chair nearer, sent Hannah a sly look, and actually gave a loud giggle. Hannah giggled in reply, for giggling, like gaping, is contagious. In two minutes more, his courage rose higher; he threw one of his long legs across the other, gave a grin, slapped his hand upon his knee, and exclaimed as bold as a lion:
“Hannah, if a young feller was for to go to offer for to kiss you, what d’ye think ye should do?”
Having uttered these words, he stopped short, his mouth wide open, in gaping astonishment at his own temerity.
If Hannah did not blush, it was probably owing to her being at that moment engaged in blowing the fire at a desperate rate with an enormous pair of broken-winded bellows, which occupation had set her all in a blowze.
She understood the hint, and replied:
“Guess ye’d better not try, Josh.”
Whether this was intended as a warning, or an invitation, never could be satisfactorily known. Josh did not stop to inquire, but he thought it too good a chance to be lost:
“I’ll kiss her! by Golly!” he exclaimed to himself.
He made a bounce from his chair and seized the nozzle of the bellows, which Hannah was sticking at that moment under a huge iron pot over the fire. Now, in this pot were apples a stewing, and so it happened that Hannah, in the confusion occasioned by the visit of Josh, had made a mistake and put in sour apples instead of sweet ones: sour apples when cooking, everybody knows, are apt to explode like bomb-shells. Hannah had been puffing at the bellows with might and main, and raised the heat to a mischievous degree; there was no safety-valve in the pot-lid, and just as Josh was upon the point of snatching a kiss, whop! the whole contents of the pot went off in their faces!