The elderly champion of the fair stood helpless and at a hopeless disadvantage; he laid hold of his square-cut beard, and held it meditatively as he gazed silently at his interlocutor. “Why _don’t_ ye tell ’em?” repeated Bassett, half-chuckling at his own cleverness, the trend of his argument seeming hardly less than inspiration. “Ye know wimmen-folks never talk none; ’twarn’t one o’ them, surely, ez tuk ter gossipin’ in the very Gyardin o’ Eden with the Evil One hisse’f. They _never_ talk none an’ spread the news, an’ when thar ain’t no news air plumb ekal ter makin’ it. Then they _never_ sets tharse’fs ter frustratin’ the men on principle, jes’ fur the enjyemint o’ the thing, though _some_ folks, ez don’t know ’em ez well ez ye an’ me, hev ’lowed wunst or twict sence the worl’ began ez they air always ekal ter _that_. A leetle spindlin’ snip o’ a gal kin fool a man six feet high an’ a two hunderd pounder ’bout ennythin’ she gins her mind ter.” “That she kin!” sourly exclaimed Peter Bryce, whose infelicitous love affairs had been so widely bruited abroad, at the time when he and Maria White, subsequently Mrs. Bowles, quarreled, that reserve on the subject would have been but an empty formality. “Oh, Pete, he’s jes’ funnin’; he ain’t hed no ’sperience o’ thar onreliability,” resumed Bassett, enraptured by the extent of his own satiric capacities when fairly tested, and having no mind to relinquish the floor of which he was so conspicuous an ornament. “Then they air so reasonable,—that’s what makes ’em so easy ter git along with. Ef enny one o’ them war ter know ’bout what we air aimin’ ter do, an’ ez we air ready ter hang them men ef we find Jake Baintree air arter enny mo’ devilmint—sence he killed Sam’l Keale, an’ got off from the court through the jedge an’ jury bein’ so all-fired weak kneed,—what would that woman say? She’d say, ‘Don’t hang ’em; it mought hurt ’em.’” There was a smothered guffaw from the younger men, and the father of the seven reasonless beings stood mute and without a word of contradiction.