“Now, Squire,” pleaded Babb whiningly, “you tell us straight. This ain’t foolin’. We ain’t been able to coax the old sir off’n that platform so fur this afternoon. He was like that on the days before the line storms and on them other times. He don’t act out a weather vane usually more’n a half hour on a stretch and then sets down and chaws tobacker with us like a human bein’!” “You’ve asked me some pretty tough questions,” said the lawyer, dismissing his jocularity. He leaned the shiny shoulders of his threadbare frock coat against the clapboards, careless of the white smooches that were immediately transferred to the cloth. “Now, as to the casting of a mist by the old chaps we have heard of in this section, I’ll say that perhaps they had the same power as some of the Hindoos that travellers describe. Men whose words ought to be good assert that to all appearances some of those fellows throw the end of a rope into the air and climb up and up, and so out of sight.” Uncle Buck pronged a mighty chew of tobacco out of the side of his jaw with his tongue and tossed it afar into the milkweed stalks that grew beside the horse shed. He snorted his unbelief. “You might just as soon tell me,” he declared, “as how that quid o’ mine could turn into a royal Bengal tiger and come roarin’ back here to chaw me up.” “I wisht a plug o’ tobacker would chase you once,” declared Amazeen. “P’raps you wouldn’t be borrowin’ so much of it all the time if you got one good scare.” Squire Phin was evidently about to explain to his fellow townsmen more explicitly regarding the mysteries of the East, as related by veracious investigators, when he was interrupted by the cause of all the argument. “Hard-Times” Wharff suddenly came down upon both feet, put his hand to his brow, peered up the highway where it snaked into the distant spruce growth, and cried in a very human tone of rural astonishment: “Well, dod-butter doughnuts, holes and all, ’tain’t no wonder the crows kept a-flyin’! Hard times is a-comin’ to town a-ridin’ on a pony. Come here and see ’em!” Led by Babb, striding on legs that worked like calipers, the old men flocked around the corner of the store into the sunshine, each uttering his own characteristic note of astonishment as he swung into view of the road. Squire Phin leisurely followed. But the spectacle in the highway was sufficient to make him stare at the approaching procession with surprise that almost equalled the emotion of his more naïve townsmen. CHAPTER II--“HIME” LOOK’S HOMECOMING WITH AN ELEPHANT AND TROUBLE AND A FEW OTHER THINGS “Go ask your mother for fifteen cents To see the elephant jump the fence, He jumps so high that he’ll hit the sky, And he won’t come down till the Fourth of July.”