Yes, I know he knows that I know, there is an answer to that name when he says it that way, but I’m not going to give it until I am ready and the place is romantically secluded enough to suit me.  He just dares me when he says it to me before other people.  That reminds me, the harvest moon is full to-night and rises an hour later every evening from now on.  I don’t want to wait another month before I propose to him.  I’ve always chosen moonlight for that catastrophe of my life.  I wonder if men have as good times planning the culmination of their suits as I am having with mine?

But I had to come down quickly to a little thing like the rally and give the signal to feed all the five hundred people, who by that time were nice, polite, ravening wolves, for Jasper had uncovered the turkey-pit to keep them from getting too brown while the lambs caught up with them.

Jane was the master of ceremonies, because I balked at the last minute.  I think I would be capable of managing even a National Convention in Chicago—­that far away from the Harpeth Valley,—­but I couldn’t do it with my friends of pioneer generations looking on.  A man or woman never grows up at all to the woman who has knitted baby socks for them or the man who has let them ride down the hill on the front of his saddle.

And at the head of the center table Jane asked the Crag to sit beside her, so that he would be in place to command attention for her when she wanted to speak, and where everybody could hear him when he did.

And while the table was piled high and emptied, and piled high again, so many bouquets of oratory were culled, tied, and cast at the guests along the table that I believe they would have been obliged to pay exclusive attention to them if the things to eat had not been just as odoriferous and substantial.  Before dinner was over everybody had spoken that was of a suitable age, and some that had heretofore in the Harpeth Valley been considered of an unsuitable sex.

Jane’s speech of welcome made such an impression that it is no wonder some of the old mothers in Israel got up to iterate it, as the dinner progressed.

She, as usual, refrained from prejudice-smashing and stones-at-glass-houses throwing, and she hadn’t said ten sentences before she had the whole feeding multitude with her.

She began on the way our pioneer mothers had to contrive to keep larders stocked and good things ready for the households, and she tickled the palate of every man present by mentioning every achievement in a culinary way that every woman of his household had made in all the generations that had gone over Harpeth Valley.  She called all the concoctions by their right names, too, and she always gave the name of the originator, who was some dear old lady that was sleeping in the Greenwood at the foot of the hill, or in some grave over at Providence or Hillsboro or Bolivar, and who was grandmother or great-grandmother to a hundred or more of the guests.  I had wondered why Jane had been poring over that old autograph manuscript receipt book in my desk for days, and as she paid these modern resurrecting compliments to the long gone cooks, tears and laughed literally deluged the table.