“Thar’s truth spoken for once, if only by accident,” retorted old Adam.  “Yonder comes Reuben Merryweather’s wagon now, laden with fodder.  Is thar anybody settin’ on it, young Adam?  My eyes is too po’ to make out.”

“Molly Merryweather, who else?” responded the younger.

The wagon approached slowly, piled high with fodder and drawn by a pair of old oxen.  In the centre of the load a girl was sitting, with a pink sunbonnet on her shoulders, and the light wind, which drove in gusts from the river, blowing the bunch of clustering brown curls on her neck.  She was a small vivid creature, with a sunburned colour and changeable blue eyes that shone almost green in the sunlight.

“Terr’ble light minded as you can tell to look at her,” said Solomon Hatch, “she’s soft enough, so my wife says, where sick folks an’ children an’ animals are consarned, but she acts as if men war born without common feelin’s of natur an’ didn’t come inside the Commandments.  It’s beyond me how a kind-hearted woman can be so unmerciful to an entire sex.”

“Had it been otherwise ’twould have been downright disproof of God’s providence and the bond of matrimony,” responded old Adam.

“True, true, Mr. Doolittle,” admitted Solomon, somewhat abashed.  “Thar ain’t any in these parts as can equal you on the Scriptures, as I’ve said over an’ over agin.  It’s good luck for the Almighty that He has got you on His side, so to speak, to help Him confound His enemies.”

“Thar’re two sides to that, I reckon, seein’ I confound not only His enemies, but His sarvents.  Sech is the shot an’ shell of my logic that the righteous fall before it as fast as the wicked—­faster even I might say if I war speakin’ particular.  Have you marked how skeery Mr. Mullen has growed about meetin’ my eyes over the rail of the pulpit?  Why, ’twas only yesterday that I brought my guns to bear on the resurrection of the body, an’ blowed it to atoms in his presence.  ’Now thar’s Reuben Merryweather who buried one leg at Manassas, Mr. Mullen,’ I said as pleasant an’ natchel as if I warn’t about to confound him, ‘an’ what I’d like to have made clear an’ easy to me, suh, is what use the Almighty is goin’ to make of that odd leg on the Day of Jedgment?  Will he add a new one onto Reuben,’ I axed, ’when, as plain as logic will have it, it won’t be a resurrection, but a creation, or will he start that leg a-trampin’ by itself all the way from Manassas to jine the other at Old Church?’ The parson had been holdin’ pretty free all the mornin’ with nobody daring to contradict him, and a man more taken aback by the power of logic my sight never lit on.  ‘Spare me, Mr. Doolittle,’ was all he said, never a word mo’.  ‘Spare me, Mr. Doolittle.’”

“Ah, a tough customer you are,” commented Solomon, “an’ what answer did you make to that, suh?”

Old Adam’s pipe returned to his mouth, and he puffed slowly a minute.  “’Twas a cry for mercy, Solomon, so I spared him,” he responded.