“Wall, no, stranger, I can’t say as I heerd much.  I guess the folks was purty well pleased.  No one seemed to be ag’in it but Square Lothrop.”

“And may I ask what he said?”

“Wall, I wouldn’t mind it, if I’se you, what he said.  He says just what he thinks—­right out with it, no matter who’s hurt—­and he usually gets the gist on’t.  But I wouldn’t mind what he said, the public was purty generally pleased.”  And the long whip lash cracks and Jim shouts, “Get an, Dandy.”

“Yes,” persisted the tortured man; “but I do want very much to know what Squire Lothrop’s opinion was.”

“Now, stranger, I wouldn’t think any more about the Square.  He’s got good common sense and allers hits the nail on the head, but as I said, you pleased ’em fust rate.”

“Yes, but I must know what Squire Lothrop did say.”

“Wall, if you will have it, he did say (and he’s apt to get the gist on’t) he did say that he thought ’twas awful shaller!”

Many epigrammatic sayings come back to me, and one is too good to be omitted, An old woman was fiercely criticising a neighbor and ended in this way:  “Folks that pretend to be somebody, and don’t act like nobody, ain’t anybody!”

Another woman reminded me of Mrs. Partington.  She told blood-curdling tales of the positive reappearance of departed spirits, and when I said, “Do you really believe all this?” she replied, “Indeed, I do, and yet I’m not an imaginary woman!” Her dog was provoked into a conflict with my setters, and she exclaimed:  “Why, I never saw him so completely ennervated.”

Then the dear old lady who said she was a free thinker and wasn’t ashamed of it; guessed she knew as much as the minister ’bout this world or the next; liked nothing better than to set down Sunday afternoons after she’d fed her hens and read Ingersoll.  “What books of his have you?” I asked.

She handed me a small paper-bound volume which did not look like any of “Bob’s” productions.  It was a Guide Book through Picturesque Vermont by Ernest Ingersoll!

And I must not omit the queer sayings of a simple-hearted hired man on a friend’s farm.

Oh, for a photo of him as I saw him one cold, rainy morning tending Jason Kibby’s dozen cows.  He had on a rubber coat and cap, but his trouser legs were rolled above the knee and he was barefoot, “Hannibal,” I shouted, “you’ll take cold with your feet in that wet grass!”

“Gueth not, Marm,” he lisped back cheerily.  “I never cared for shooth mythelf.”

He was always shouting across the way to inquire if “thith wath hot enough or cold enough to thute me?” As if I had expressed a strong desire for phenomenal extremes of temperature.  One morning he suddenly departed.  I met him trudging along with three hats jammed on to his head and a rubber coat under his arm, for ’twas a fine day.

“Why, Hanny!” I exclaimed, “where are you going in such haste?”