We didn’t go in, but Josiah slipped in one day when I wuzn’t with him, and he described it to me.  He owned up to me that he had.

And he said he did it to keep me from havin’ sech a skair.

“Why,” sez he, “a woman that is afraid of a gobbler, and runs from a snake—­

“Why,” sez he, “I wouldn’t as a man of feelin’ take her right in the way of havin’ her feelin’s hurt and skairin’ her most to death for nothin’ this world could give.”

And I said—­and I meant it—­“If it hadn’t been for the fifty cents I guess you wouldn’t felt so, Josiah Allen.”

But he stuck to it that it wuz pure affection and principle.  I d’no what to think about it, but I have my suspicions.

Wall, at the next place Josiah could not be restrained.  It wuz the good old-fashioned New England house with gable ends, and here a good New England dinner wuz served.

And sez Josiah, “I don’t leave this house till I have a good square meal.”

Bizer felt jest so, and so Selinda and I jined ’em in a meal most as good as she and I got up to hum, and that is sayin’ a great deal.

Josiah’s satisfaction in eatin’ that pork and beans, and them doughnuts, wuz a sight to witness.

Bizer called for cold biled vittles, and sure enough, they brung ’em on.

And the enjoyment of them two men wuz extreme.  Selinda and I took comfort in some old-fashioned pound-cake and custard pie.

Selinda said she’d love to have the receipt of that pound-cake.

Selinda is a good plain cook.  She can’t cook like me, of course, but she duz well.

Wall, their extra good meal had sot up Josiah and Bizer to a wonderful extent (they had drunk coffee too strong for ’em by half, and I knew it), and them two men wanted to go back into the Cairo Street.  Bizer and Selinda had never seen it, and all the way there Josiah seemed to be on the lookout to do sunthin’ heroic and surprisin’ to Bizer.

And jest after we got there, we did see as strange a sight as I ever see.  It wuz a Eastern Fakir, as they called him.  He wuz performin’ one of his strange sights right there before our face and eyes.

A big crowd wuz gathered round him of human bein’s in all strange costumes, and camels and their drivers, and dromedaries, and donkeys, and everything else under the sun.  But this man stood calm under the sights and ear-piercin’ yells and jabbers.

And in some way, I d’no how, nor Josiah don’t, he wuz a-holdin’ another Japan or Turkey—­anyway, one of them foreign men—­suspended right up in the air.

I see it, and Josiah see it, and Bizerses folks.  Eight eyes from Jonesville looked at it, to say nothin’ of the assembled crowd.

He wuzn’t restin’ on nothin’ at all, so fur as we could see.  What material wrought out of the Occult World wuz piled up under him I d’no.

There might have been a sofa and two cushions wrought out of another fabric different from what we know anything about, and that don’t make any show aginst the summer sky.