,--only that nobody _could really_ have such very genteel
curls to grow--Oh--oh--grandfather!"

She did not offer to return it, but stood with it poised on one hand,
well out of harm's way, while she surveyed Mivane reproachfully yet with
expectant sympathy.

Perhaps he himself was glad that he could wreak no further damage which
he would later regret, and contented himself with furiously pounding his
cane upon the puncheon floor, a sturdy structure and well calculated to
bear the brunt of such expressions of pettish rage.

"Dolt, ass, fool, that I am!" he cried. "That I should so far forget
myself as to offer to go as an ambassador to the herders on the Keowee!"
And once more he banged the floor after a fashion that discounted the
thumping of the batten, and the room resounded with the thwacks.

An old dog, a favorite of yore, lying asleep on the hearth, only opened
his eyes and wrinkled his brows to make sure, it would seem, who had the
stick; then closing his lids peacefully snoozed away again, presently
snoring in the fullness of his sense of security. But a late
acquisition, a gaunt deerhound, after an earnest observation of his
comrade's attitude, as if referring the crisis to his longer experience,
scrutinized severally the faces of the members of the family, and,
wincing at each resounding whack, finally gathered himself together
apprehensively, as doubtful whose turn might come next, and discreetly
slunk out unobserved by the back door.

Peninnah Penelope Anne rushed to the rescue.

"And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?" she demanded.

"Why--why--because, girl, I am deafer than the devil's dam! I cannot
fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for
ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office."

Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her
pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he
had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten
with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile.
She responded, however, with something of her mother's indirection.

"Under your favor, sir, you don't know how deaf the devil's dam may
be--and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I'm sure it reminds
me of that man they call 'X,'--a sort of churl person,--who talks of the
devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if--as if he were a
native."

This was a turning of th