“Marciful Master!” he exclaimed, “ef the boy hain’t! well, how in the round creation of the——! Ben, did you ever! to be sure and sartin, Satan has power on this yearth!” and Mr. Suggs groaned in heavy bitterness.
“You never seed nothin’ like that in Augusty, did ye, daddy?” asked Simon, with a malicious wink at Ben.
“Simon, how did you do it?” queried the old man, without noticing his son’s question.
“Do it, daddy? Do it? ’Taint nothin’. I done it jest as easy as—shootin’.”
Whether this explanation was entirely, or in any degree, satisfactory to the perplexed mind of the Elder Jedediah Suggs, cannot, after the lapse of time which has intervened, be sufficiently ascertained. It is certain, however, that he pressed the investigation no farther, but merely requested his son Benjamin to witness the fact that, in consideration of his love and affection for his son Simon, and in order to furnish the donee with the means of leaving that portion of the state of Georgia, he bestowed upon him the impracticable pony, “Bunch.”
“Jist so, daddy, jist so; I’ll witness that. But it ’minds me mightily of the way mammy give old Trailler the side of bacon, last week. She was a-sweepin’ up the hath—the meat on the table; old Trailler jumps up, gethers the bacon and darts; mammy arter him with the broomstick as fur as the door, but seein’ the dog has got the start, she shakes the stick at him, and hollers, ‘You sassy, aig-sukkin’, roguish, gnatty, flopped-eared varmint, take it along, take it along! I only wish ’twas full of a’snic and ox vomit and blue vitrul, so as ’twould cut your intrils into chitlins!’ That’s about the way you give Bunch to Simon.”
It was evident to our hero that his father intended he should remain but one more night beneath the paternal roof. What mattered it to Simon?
He went home at night, curried and fed Bunch; whispered confidentially in his ear, that he was the “fastest piece of hoss-flesh, accordin’ to size, that ever shaded the yearth;” and then busied himself in preparing for an early start on the morrow.
VII.
MY FIRST VISIT TO PORTLAND.[[8]]
In the fall of the year 1829, I took it into my head I’d go to Portland. I had heard a good deal about Portland, what a fine place it was, and how the folks got rich there proper fast; and that fall there was a couple of new papers come up to our place from there, called the “Portland Courier,” and “Family Reader,” and they told a good many queer kind of things, about Portland and one thing another; and all at once it popped into my head, and I up and told father, and sais: