While our meal was being cooked, Jack disappeared with his rod. I had a long talk with the mistress of the house. She was a “Free-will Baptist” and very much opposed to the Irish and Catholics generally. Her objections to the former were thus curtly summed up, “The critters get rich off a rock, and have sich litters of children.”
During the ensuing conversation she remarked, “I have four sons, and every one of them professors.”
“Ah!” said I, in all simplicity, “they must be doing very well; but what do they teach?”
“Teach?—they don’t teach nothing. I said they were professors.”
“Well, then,” I asked, “what do they profess?”
“Why, professors of religion, of course,” answered the good dame—“every one of ‘em baptized in yon lake. Oh! it was a glor’ous sight!”
The good old lady—for she was past eighty—showed me her dairy, and apartments of the house which she said were usually occupied by boarders at this time of the year. She had woven all the carpets, quilts, towels, napkins, and table-cloths of the whole establishment, and everything looked very neat and old-fashioned.
“I’m mighty sorry you have to hurry off,” said she, “I could make you the nicest chowder you ever tasted. My man knows just where to get the fish. A few years ago we sent off, at once, one hundred and fifty pounds of clean lake trout.”
I, too, was sorry that we were obliged to hasten on our journey, as I thought, for the first time since we started, of Hawkins & Smith and a long year in the gloomy salesroom.
Jack came late for dinner with five small brook-trout in his hand.