"He said a good deal more'n his prayers, I can tell you that. He said his object in going to the Bahamas, to which he never went, after all, was to look into the possibility of securin' a large tract of land there for the cultivation and growth of sisal. Now what under the sun would you suppose sisal was? I saw in the book that sisal was being grown in increasing quantities in the islands, and I just naturally supposed it was some sort of animal. It might of been buffalo, or it might of been guinea pigs, but when I spoke at the Sewing Society of how Jathrop had mentioned the great number of sisal, and Mrs. Allen says: 'What is sisal?' I just right then and there on the spur of the minute says: 'Why, don't you know? Sisal is a sort of small oxen striped like a zebra and spotted like a leopard.' And would you believe it, Mrs. Lathrop, when Mr. Kimball asked me that same question to-day, I said the very same thing--small oxen striped like a zebra and spotted like a leopard. 'That's what Mrs. Allen told me you said, Miss Clegg,' says he, 'but accordin' to the paper, Jathrop Lathrop don't quite agree with you.' I don't know, Mrs. Lathrop, I d'n know, I'm sure, why Jathrop should take pleasure in making me appear like a ignoramus, but there ain't no question about it that that's what he did when he gave that interview to that there reporter. 'What kind of animal is a sisal, then, Mr. Kimball?' I asked, and you can believe me my blood was boilin' in my veins. 'It ain't no animal a _tall_,' he says. 'It's hemp what they make ropes out of to hang murderers with. And the seeds they feed canaries on.' 'Well,' I says, 'that may be the reporter's sisal, but it ain't mine, and it ain't Jathrop's. The newspapers never get nothin' right nohow, but when it comes to reducin' cattle into rope and birdseed, they are certainly goin' one better on the Chicago pork packers.' In all my life I have never been a respecter of the untruth, but I know enough on the subject to tell a good lie when necessity calls upon me and to stick to it as long as it has an eyelid to hang by. But I will say this for your son Jathrop, Mrs. Lathrop, and that is that before he got done with that reporter, he didn't leave so much as a eyelash, let alone a lid. It wasn't only that he'd never been to those islands a _tall_, and I'd been tellin' everybody in town as how I'd had a letter from him there every week the whole summer through, but he must air his acquaintance with things on the islands just as if he'd been born and raised there. And it seems there ain't no natives within miles of the Bahamas, and hasn't been since Columbus and his people was there, goin' on fifteen hundred years ago. Columbus told 'em that he'd take 'em to the land where all their dead relatives and friends had gone to, a land flowin' with milk and honey, and he kept his word. Seems he shipped every last mother's son and daughter of 'em back to Spain with him, and left the islands bare for the next comers.