"Mis' Tucker says her cousin's got real talent, and I guess she has. She's got courage, anyhow, and lungs! They say she took a gold medal the time she graduated. The whole class stood up in a row and recited 'The Maniac,' and she outscreeched all the rest without half trying. Did you ever hear it, Mis' Strout? The girl in the piece is as crazy as a loon, but she don't know it, and at the end of every verse she says,'_I am not mad! I am not mad!_' Well, this reciter--what _is_ her name now?--I know it as well as I do my own! Her mother was one o' them hombly Muckfords that used to live over on the Flag Medder road. Well, anyway, the rest o' the class jest said '_I am not mad_' in the craziest way they could; but when it come her turn they say she put in a screech right in the middle that you could 'a' heard all over the county, and the judges fairly leapt right out o' their seats on the platform. There wa'n't no discussion as to who should have the medal; she earned it and she got it. She's splendid--Eldora Duncombe--that's her name, and I'm glad I've got it at last--but so many of our ladies here sleeps alone in their houses at nights that they told Mis' Tucker they couldn't go hear her cousin any more unless she read quieter pieces; an' she said if she read quieter pieces what would be the good of knowin' elocution? "This author wa'n't no elocutionist and no screecher neither, but she hed a kind of a takin' way with her after all--I must say that; though Si thought her hair was full red to read in public with. Did you hear how handsome the church looked? If speakers don't like the pulpit we gen'rally move it one side and have a marble-top table with a pitcher of water and a tumbler, and a boquet of verbenias on it; but there was a girl from Lowell summer-boardin' at Mis' Doctor Smith's--Hazel Perkins her name is--an' she'd ben to an Author's Readin', an' she offered to decorate the platform jest like a parlor. It looked handsome, but land, it was queer! I never see such a collection of onnecessary things in my life. Si said it looked to him as if the Old Boy'd ben havin' an auction on it! And the trouble that Perkins girl took, borrowin' from all the neighbors that lived within a mile o' the meetin'-house! Why, I declare, the audience stared so at the decorations they didn't pay no kind of attention to the reader. We ain't got so much furniture round here that we don't know the looks of our neighbors' things pretty well, and everybody was cranin' and gapin' and studyin' to see who'd ben asked to lend and who hadn't. Si told Miss Perkins if she'd 'a' put on a bed and a cook-stove the author could 'a' kep' house on the platform and ben real comfortable.