“I wouldn't go so fur ez to say that,” spake Judge Priest soothingly. “Frum where I'm settin' it looks to me like the joke is mainly on quite a number of people.” “And the shotgun wasn't loaded?” Seemingly Mr. Flournoy found it hard to credit his own ears. “It didn't have nary charge in ary barrel,” reaffirmed the old man. “That little woman had the spunk to go up there all alone by herse'f and bluff a whole roomful of grown men, but she didn't dare to load up her old fusee--said she didn't know how, in the first place, and, in the second place, she was skeered it mout go off and hurt somebody. Jerome, ain't that fur all the world jest like a woman?” IX. A BEAUTIFUL EVENING * * Publisher's Note--Under a different title this story was printed originally in another volume of Mr. Cobb's. It is included here in order to complete the chronicles of Judge Priest and his people as begun in the book called “Back Home” and continued in this book. THERE was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that used to bother strangers until they got used to it. It started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up interminably--so it seemed to them--a monotonous, jarring thump-thump, thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a steamy hot halo of their own goodness, the aliens knew what it was that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt amply recompensed for those lost hours of beauty sleep. In these degenerate days I believe there is a machine that accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take the poetry out of the operation. Judge Priest, and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, would have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as plastic as sculptor's modelling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then, with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round disks and delicately pink each one with a fork--and then, if you were listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an iron lip.