Tubal Sims, like other men, fluctuated in his estimation of his wife’s abilities according as they seemed to him convertible to his aid. Ordinarily, he was wont to commend Jane Ann Sims’s logical common sense as “powerful smartness,” and had been known to lean on her judgment even in the matter of “craps,” in which, if anywhere, man is safe from the interference and even the ambition of woman. He rejoiced in her freedom from the various notions which appertain to her sex, and felt a certain pride that she too had withstood the panic which had so preyed upon the pleasures of the “show.” But now, when her lack of the subtler receptivities balked him of a possible approach to the key of the mystery which he sought to solve, he was irritated because of her density of perception, and disposed to underrate her capacities to deduce aught from that cabalistic phrase which he alone had heard uttered in the deep midnight and from such slender premises to frame a just conclusion. And furthermore, with the rebuff he realized anew that Jane Ann Sims was a woman, incompetent of reason save in its most superficial processes, or she would have perceived that the significance of the unbaited hook lay in the strange mental perturbation which could involve the neglect of so essential a particular, not in the obvious fruitlessness of the labor. Jane Ann Sims was a woman. Let her wash the dishes. “Naw,” he said aloud, half scornfully, “he’ll ketch no feesh.” Mrs. Sims ceased to wheeze, and her fat face relapsed from the pious distortions of her psalmody into its normal creases and dimples. “I be plumb fit ter fly inter the face o’ Providence,” she said, as she moved heavily about the table and slapped down a blue platter but half dried. “What fur?” demanded the lord of the house, whose sense of humor was too blunted by his speculations, and a haunting anxiety, and a troublous eagerness to discuss the question of his discovery, to perceive aught of the ludicrous in the lightsome metaphor with which his weighty spouse had characterized her disaffection with the ordering of events. “Kase Euphemy ain’t hyar, o’ course. Ye ’pear ter be sorter dunder-headed this mornin’!” Thus the weaker vessel! She wheezed one more line of her matutinal hymn in a dolorous cadence and with breathy interstices between the spondees; then suddenly and finally discarding the exercise, she began to speak with animation: “I hev always claimed an’ sot out ter be suthin’ of a prophet,--ye yerse’f know ez I be more weatherwise ’n common. I be toler’ble skilled in cow diseases, too; an’ I kin say ’forehand who be goin’ ter git ’lected ter office,--ginerally, though, by knowin’ who hev got money an’ holds his hand slack; an’ I kin tell what color hair a baby be goin’ ter hev whenst he ain’t got so much ez a furze on the top o’ his bald pate; an’ whenst ye ’low ye air strict sober of a Christmastime or sech, I kin tell ter a--a quart how much applejack hev gone down yer gullet; an’”--