“Sure, I’m better out there!” he ventured to insist, in a wheedling tone; but Abner thundered forth an angry “No, sir!” and the Irishman sank abruptly into the seat beside Hagadorn. From this place he eyed the Underwood girl with a glare of contemptuous disapproval. I learned afterward that M’rye and Janey Wilcox regarded her desertion of them as the meanest episode of the whole miserable morning, and beguiled their labors over the stove by recounting to each other all the low-down qualities illustrated by the general history of her “sapheaded tribe.” Meanwhile conversation languished. With the third or fourth instalment of cakes, Janey Wilcox had halted long enough to deliver herself of a few remarks, sternly limited to the necessities of the occasion. “M’rye says,” she declaimed, coldly, looking the while with great fixedness at the hay-wall, “if the cakes are sour she can’t help it. We saved what was left over of the batter, but the Graham flour and the sody are both burnt up,” and with that stalked out again. Not even politeness could excuse the pretence on any one’s part that the cakes were _not_ sour, but Abner seized upon the general subject as an opening for talk. “‘Member when I was a little shaver,” he remarked, with an effort at amiability, “my sisters kicked about havin’ to bake the cakes, on account of the hot stove makin’ their faces red an’ spoilin’ their complexions, an’ they wanted specially to go to some fandango or other, an’ look their pootiest, an’ so father sent us boys out into the kitchen to bake ’em instid. Old Lorenzo Dow the Methodist preacher, was stoppin’ overnight at our house, an’ mother was jest beside herself to have everything go off ship-shape--an’ then them cakes begun comin’ in. Fust my brother William, he baked one the shape of a horse, an’ then Josh, he made one like a jackass with ears as long as the griddle would allow of lengthwise, and I’d got jest comfortably started in on one that I begun as a pig, an’ then was going to alter into a ship with sails up, when father, he come out with hold-back strap, an’--well--mine never got finished to this day. Mother, she was mortified most to death, but old Dow, he jest lay back and laughed--laughed till you’d thought he’d split himself.” “It was from Lorenzo Dow’s lips that I had my first awakening call unto righteousness,” said Jee Hagadorn, speaking with solemn unction in high, quavering tones. The fact that he should have spoken at all was enough to take even the sourness out of M’rye’s cakes. Abner took up the ball with solicitous promptitude. “A very great man, Lorenzo Dow was--in his way,” he remarked. “By grace he was spared the shame and humiliation,” said Hagadorn, lifting his voice as he went on--“the humiliation of living to see one whole branch of the Church separate itself from the rest--withdraw and call itself the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in defence of human slavery!”