Tom—­“Well, Bill, when we get back to God’s country, you and Jim and John must all come to my house and take dinner with me.  I want to give you a square meal.  I want to show you just what good livin’ is.  You know my mother is just the best cook in all that section.  When she lays herself out to get up a meal all the other women in the neighborhood just stand back and admire!”

Bill—­“O, that’s all right; but I’ll bet she can’t hold a candle to my mother, when it comes to good cooking.”

Jim—­“No, nor to mine.”

John—­(with patronizing contempt.) “O, shucks!  None of you fellers were ever at our house, even when we had one of our common weekday dinners.”

Tom—­(unheedful of the counter claims.) I hev teen studyin’ up the dinner I’d like, and the bill-of-fare I’d set out for you fellers when you come over to see me.  First, of course, we’ll lay the foundation like with a nice, juicy loin roast, and some mashed potatos.

Bill—­(interrupting.) “Now, do you like mashed potatos with beef?  The way may mother does is to pare the potatos, and lay them in the pan along with the beef.  Then, you know, they come out just as nice and crisp, and brown; they have soaked up all the beef gravy, and they crinkle between your teeth—­”

Jim—­“Now, I tell you, mashed Neshannocks with butter on ’em is plenty good enough for me.”

John—­“If you’d et some of the new kind of peachblows that we raised in the old pasture lot the year before I enlisted, you’d never say another word about your Neshannocks.”

Tom—­(taking breath and starting in fresh.) “Then we’ll hev some fried Spring chickens, of our dominick breed.  Them dominicks of ours have the nicest, tenderest meat, better’n quail, a darned sight, and the way my mother can fry Spring chickens——­”

Bill—­(aside to Jim.) “Every durned woman in the country thinks she can ‘spry ching frickens;’ but my mother—–­”

John—­“You fellers all know that there’s nobody knows half as much about chicken doin’s as these ‘tinerant Methodis’ preachers.  They give ’em chicken wherever they go, and folks do say that out in the new settlements they can’t get no preachin’, no gospel, nor nothin’, until the chickens become so plenty that a preacher is reasonably sure of havin’ one for his dinner wherever he may go.  Now, there’s old Peter Cartwright, who has traveled over Illinoy and Indianny since the Year One, and preached more good sermons than any other man who ever set on saddle-bags, and has et more chickens than there are birds in a big pigeon roost.  Well, he took dinner at our house when he came up to dedicate the big, white church at Simpkin’s Corners, and when he passed up his plate the third time for more chicken, he sez, sez he:—­I’ve et at a great many hundred tables in the fifty years I have labored in the vineyard of the Redeemer, but I must say, Mrs. Kiggins, that your way of frying chickens is a leetle the nicest that I ever knew.  I only wish that the sisters generally would get your reseet.’  Yes, that’s what he said,—­’a leetle the nicest.’”