"I like Mrs. Wedge," Tug said, looking at that excellent woman with a tipsy grin, as she came into the room with some new delicacy for her employer's guests. "She looks so common, somehow, and I don't believe she knows any more about manners than I do. Whenever you see her eating her dinner, you'll find that she puts her arms on the table, as I do, though it's not polite. Polite things are not natural, in my opinion; mind I don't assert it as positive. I hate cold water, but it's polite to bathe; and your respectable shirt-collars rub all the hide off my neck. And anything that's good for me, I don't like. There's oatmeal, and graham grits, and such like--they are healthy, therefore I don't like their taste; but give me milk gravy, or salt risin' bread, or fried beef, or anything else that's not good for me, and you'll find me at home, as the man who had the party said on his cards." During this discourse Mr. Whittle's great eye was following Mrs. Wedge about the room, but when she disappeared it lit on Dorris. "I'm with the crowd, though, when it comes to my wife's kin," he said, eyeing his host in an impudent way. "A good many don't say so; but it makes them all hot to fill their houses with their relations. Whenever you go to see your relations, depend upon it that they are glad when you are gone. They may pretend to like you, but they don't, except when you are away from them. But in all other respects I'm common. Common! I'm so common that I like boiled cabbage; and the olives you blow about--I'd as soon eat green pignuts soaked in brine. _Common!_" He yelled out the words as though he were calling some one of that name in the cellar. "If men were judged by their commonness, I would be a chief with plumes in my hat." Allan Dorris and Silas Davy were seated with their backs to the windows overlooking the town, while Tug sat opposite them, and in transferring his gaze from one to the other, in dignified preparation for resuming his conversation, which both his companions were enjoying, he saw the mysterious face he had seen once before peering into the room, and which was hastily withdrawn. Tug jumped up from his chair at sight of it, and hurried to the window with such haste that the table was almost upset; but the face, as well as the figure to which it belonged, had disappeared. Throwing up the sash, Tug found that he could step out on to a porch, and from this he dropped into the yard with a great crash through the vines and lattice-work. Silas Davy quickly followed, by way of the stairs, suspecting the cause of Tug's disappearance; and Dorris was left alone. All this had occupied but a few moments, and he probably thought of the circumstance as one of the many eccentricities of the two odd men; for after pulling down the lever to close the gate (it is a wonder that he was not surprised to find it open) he sat down before the fire and engaged in the pleasant thoughts that were interrupted early in the evening.