milksop and nincompoop, a fool and a blackguard and a coward all rolled up into one piece of brown paper, ef he wants to.  And what’s to hender?  A’n’t he a free-born an’ enlightened citizen of this glorious and civilized and Christian land of Hail Columby?  What business has a Dutchman, ef he’s ever so smart and honest and larned, got in our broad domains, resarved for civil and religious liberty?  What business has he got breathin’ our atmosphere or takin’ refuge under the feathers of our American turkey-buzzard?  No, my beloved and respected feller-citizen of native birth, it’s as plain to me as the wheels of ’Zek’el and the year 1843.  I say, Hip, hip, hoo-ray fer liberty or death, and down with the Dutch!”

Norman Anderson scratched his head.

What did Jonas mean?

He couldn’t exactly divine; but it is safe to say that on the whole he was not entirely satisfied with this boomerang speech.  He rather thought that he had better not depend on Jonas.

But he was not long in finding allies enough in his war against Germany.

CHAPTER XXIII.

SOMETHIN’ LUDIKEROUS.

There was an egg-supper in the country store at Brayville.  Mr. Mandluff, the tall and raw-boned Hoosier who kept the store, was not unwilling to have the boys get up an egg supper now and then in his store after he had closed the front-door at night.  For you must know that an egg-supper is a peculiar Western institution.  Sometimes it is a most enjoyable institution—­when it has its place in a store where there is no Kentucky whisky to be had.  But in Brayville, in the rather miscellaneous establishment of the not very handsome and not very graceful Mr. Mandluff, an egg-supper was not a great moral institution.  It was otherwise, and profanely called by its votaries a camp-meeting; it would be hard to tell why, unless it was that some of the insiders grew very happy before it was over.  For an egg-supper at Mandluff’s store was to Brayville what an oyster-supper at Delmonico’s is to New York.  It was one tenth hard eggs and nine tenths that beverage which bears the name of an old royal house of France.

How were the eggs cooked?  I knew somebody would ask that impertinent question.  Well, they were not fried, they were not boiled, they were not poached, they were not scrambled, they were not omeletted, they were not roasted on the half-shell, they were not stuffed with garlic and served with cranberries, they were not boiled and served with anchovy sauce, they were not “en salmi.”  I think I had better stop there, lest I betray my knowledge of cookery.  It is sufficient to say that they were not cooked in any of the above-named fashions, nor in any other way mentioned in Catharine Beecher’s or Marion Harland’s cookbooks.  They were baked a la mode backwoods.  It is hardly proper for me to give a recipe in this place, that belongs more properly to the “Household Departments”