The Hired Man, realizing that he was under obligation to tell his version of the "darndest thing" in his experience, was solemn, as befits a public performer. When the psychological moment was proclaimed by the falling down into a roseate pile of coals of the last log for the night, he discharged his duty and told this unimportant tale: HENRY PETERS'S SIGNATURE THE HIRED MAN'S SECOND TALE The Colonel's story of how the law and the courts work, reminded me of what happened to old Hen Peters and his forty-second nephew, Hank. It all arose from a debate at the literary at the Bollinger school-house back in Iowa. You see, old Hen's girl Fanny come home from the State Normal at Cedar Falls as full of social uplift as a yeast-cake, and framed up this literary. It was a lulu of a society, and nights when the sledding was good, the teams just surrounded the lot, and the bells jingled as uplifting as you could ask. The night of the scrap Hank brought Fanny. The debate was on which was the most terrible scourge, fire or water. Hank was on the negative, and Fanny's father on the affirmative. Old Hen spoke of the way prairie fires devastated things in an early day, and read history, and gave a beautiful tribute to the Chicago fire and the O'Leary cow. Hank coughed with the dust kicked up when Hen sat down, but he got back with a rhapsody on the Hoang-Ho floods, and the wet season in Noah's time. He said that his honorable opponent ought to take a moment or two from time to time to ascertain the properties of water as a scourge, as an inward remedy, and as a lotion. Now besides having an appetite for red-eye, old Hen was whiskery and woolly-necked, and handling lots of tame hay, he looked sort of unwashed. So the crowd yelled shameful and laughed; and when Hen got up to answer, he was so mad his whiskers stood out like a rooster's hackle, his words came out in a string like, all lapped on one another, and blurred, and linked together so you couldn't tell one from the other; and finally they reversed on the bobbin, and gigged back into his system, and rumbled and reverberated around in him like a flock of wild cattle loose in an empty barn; and the crowd got one of those giggly fits when every one makes the other laugh till they are sore and sick. Asa Wagstaff fell backward out of a window on to a hitching-post, and made Brad Phelps' team break loose. Old Hen stood shaking his fist at them and turning so red in the face that he got blue, and sat down without saying a syllable that any one could understand. You could hear folks hollering and screaming in fits of that laughing disease going home, and getting out and rolling in the snow because they were in agony, and nothing but rolling would touch the spot. But old Hen Peters seemed to be immune.