"'I don't care ef your Bear Grass County man is so shortwaisted he can use his hip pockets for year-muffs in the winter time. Concede, if you will, that every time he coughs it shakes the enamel off'n his teeth. The pint remains, I repeat, my feller citizens, that there ain't no licker ever distilled can throw him with them eyes and that there Adamses' apple. You gen'elmen 'd a sight better pick out some big feller which his eyes is bunched up close together like the yallers in a double yolk aig and which his Adamses' apple is comparatively stationary.' "But Colonel Bud, he wouldn't listen. Maybe he was kinder jealous at seeing old Squire Buck Throckmorton setting hisse'f up as a jedge of human nature that-a-way. Even the greatest of us air but mortal, and I reckon Colonel Bud wouldn't admit that anybody could outdo him reading character offhand, and he taken the floor agin. Replying to his venerable friend and neighbor, he would say that the Squire was talking like a plain derned fool. Continuing he would add that it didn't make no difference if both eyes was riding the bridge of the nose side-saddle, or if they was crowding the ears for position. "'Now, as to the Adamses' apple, which he would consider next in this brief reply,' he went on to explain, 'Science teached us that the Adamses' apple didn't have no regular functions to speak of, and what few it did have bore no relation to the consumption of licker in the reg'lar and customary manner, viz., to-wit, by swallowing of the same from demijohn, dipper, tumbler or gourd. The Adamses' apple was but a natchel ornament nestled at the base of the chin whiskers. He asked if any gen'elman in the sound of his voice ever see a bowlder on the side of a dreen, enlessen it was covered, in whole or in part, by vines? The same wise provision of Nature was to be observed in the Adamses' apple, it being, ef he mout be pardoned for using such a figger of speech, at sich a time, the bowlder, and the chin whiskers, the vine. "'It's the size that counts,' said Colonel Bud Crittenden. 'It natchelly stands to reason that a big scaffolded-up man like Stony Bugg can chamber more licker than a little runt like that Burnett. Why, he could do it if Burnett was spangled all over with Adamses' apples and all of them palpitating like skeered lizards. He could do it if Burnett's eyes were so fur apart he was cross-eyed behind. Besides, this here Burnett is a mountaineering gen'elman, and I mistrust not, he's been educated altogether on white moonshine licker fresh out of the still. When red licker, with some age behind it, takes holt of his abbreviated vitals he's shore going to wilt and wilt sudden and complete. "'Red licker, say about fourteen year old, is mighty deceivin' to a mountaineer. It tastes so smooth he forgets that it's strong enough to take off warts.'