So we sat resting, thinking of nothing; and presently we heard the screen door click and Ann Spencer’s motherly voice: 

“Come in now, Mr. Grayson, and get your dinner.”

Harriet had set the table on the east porch, where it was cool and shady.  Dick and I sat down opposite each other and between us there was a great brown bowl of moist brown beans with crispy strips of pork on top, and a good steam rising from its depths; and a small mountain of baked potatoes, each a little broken to show the snowy white interior; and two towers of such new bread as no one on this earth (or in any other planet so far as I know) but Harriet can make.  And before we had even begun our dinner in came the ample Ann Spencer, quaking with hospitality, and bearing a platter—­let me here speak of it with the bated breath of a proper respect, for I cannot even now think of it without a sort of inner thrill—­bearing a platter of her most famous fried chicken.  Harriet had sacrificed the promising careers of two young roosters upon the altar of this important occasion.  I may say in passing that Ann Spencer is more celebrated in our neighbourhood by virtue of her genius at frying chicken, than Aristotle or Solomon or Socrates, or indeed all the big-wigs of the past rolled into one.

So we fell to with a silent but none the less fervid enthusiasm.  Harriet hovered about us, in and out of the kitchen, and poured the tea and the buttermilk, and Ann Spencer upon every possible occasion passed the chicken.

“More chicken, Mr. Grayson?” she would inquire in a tone of voice that made your mouth water.

“More chicken, Dick?” I’d ask.

“More chicken, Mr. Grayson,” he would respond—­and thus we kept up a tenuous, but pleasant little joke between us.

Just outside the porch in a thicket of lilacs a catbird sang to us while we ate, and my dog lay in the shade with his nose on his paws and one eye open just enough to show any stray flies that he was not to be trifled with—­and far away to the North and East one could catch glimpses—­if he had eyes for such things—­of the wide-stretching pleasantness of our countryside.

I soon saw that something mysterious was going on in the kitchen.  Harriet would look significantly at Ann Spencer and Ann Spencer, who could scarcely contain her overflowing smiles, would look significantly at Harriet.  As for me, I sat there with perfect confidence in myself—­in my ultimate capacity, as it were.  Whatever happened, I was ready for it!

And the great surprise came at last:  a SHORT-CAKE:  a great, big, red, juicy, buttery, sugary short-cake, with raspberries heaped up all over it.  When It came in—­and I am speaking of it in that personal way because it radiated such an effulgence that I cannot now remember whether it was Harriet or Ann Spencer who brought it in—­when It came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occasions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a long, low, expressive whistle.  When Beethoven found himself throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evidently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled—­and then looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have infringed upon the proprieties of that occasion.