Tom—­“An’ then, we’ll hev biscuits an’ butter.  I’ll just bet five hundred dollars to a cent, and give back the cent if I win, that we have the best butter at our house that there is in Central Illinoy.  You can’t never hev good butter onless you have a spring house; there’s no use of talkin’—­all the patent churns that lazy men ever invented—­all the fancy milk pans an’ coolers, can’t make up for a spring house.  Locations for a spring house are scarcer than hen’s teeth in Illinoy, but we hev one, and there ain’t a better one in Orange County, New York.  Then you’ll see dome of the biscuits my mother makes.”

Bill—­“Well, now, my mother’s a boss biscuit-maker, too.”

Jim—­“You kin just gamble that mine is.”

John—­“O, that’s the way you fellers ought to think an’ talk, but my mother——­”

Tom—­(coming in again with fresh vigor) “They’re jest as light an’ fluffy as a dandelion puff, and they melt in your month like a ripe Bartlett pear.  You just pull ’em open—­Now you know that I think there’s nothin’ that shows a person’s raisin’ so well as to see him eat biscuits an’ butter.  If he’s been raised mostly on corn bread, an’ common doins,’ an’ don’t know much about good things to eat, he’ll most likely cut his biscuit open with a case knife, an’ make it fall as flat as one o’ yesterday’s pancakes.  But if he is used to biscuits, has had ’em often at his house, he’ll—­just pull ’em open, slow an’ easy like, then he’ll lay a little slice of butter inside, and drop a few drops of clear honey on this, an’ stick the two halves back, together again, an—­”

“Oh, for God Almighty’s sake, stop talking that infernal nonsense,” roar out a half dozen of the surrounding crowd, whose mouths have been watering over this unctuous recital of the good things of the table.  “You blamed fools, do you want to drive yourselves and everybody else crazy with such stuff as that.  Dry up and try to think of something else.”

CHAPTER XLVI.

Surly Briton—­the stolid courage that makes the English flag A banner of
triumph—­our company bugler, his characteristics and his death—­urgent
demand for mechanics—­none want to go—­treatment of A rebel shoemaker
—­enlargement of the stockade—­it is broken by A storm
—­the wonderful spring.