t none o' yore
other functions ain't open to salivation. _Good_-night, Enoch."

"Oh, she always looks after that, doctor. She's mighty attentive, come
to withholdin' harmful temptations. Good-bye, doctor. It's did me good
to open my mind to you a little.

"Yas," he added, looking steadily into his palm as the buggy rolled
away--"yas, it's did me good to talk to him; but I ain't no more
reconciled to you, you barefaced, high-foreheaded little roly-poly, you.
Funny how a pill thet 'ain't got a feature on earth can look me out o'
countenance the way it can, and frustrate my speech. Talk about whited
sepulchures, an' ravenin' wolves! I don't know how come I to let on thet
I was feelin' puny to-night, nohow. I might've knew--with all them
clo'es bedaubled over--though I can't, ez the doctor says, see how me
a-takin' a pill is goin' to help matters--but of co'se I wouldn't let on
to him, an' he a bachelor."

He stopped talking and felt his wrist.

"Maybe my pulse is obstropulous, an' ought to be sedated down. Reckon
I'll haf to kill that steer--or sell him, one--though I swo'e I
wouldn't. But of co'se I swo'e that in a temper, an' temp'rate vows
ain't never made 'cep'in' to be repented of."

Several times during the last few minutes, while the deacon spoke, there
had come to him across the garden from the kitchen the unmistakable odor
of fried chicken.

He had foreseen that there would be a good supper to-night, and that the
tiny globule within his palm would constitute for him a prohibition
concerning it.

Grandmother Gregg was one of those worthy if difficult women who never
let anything interfere with her duty as she saw it magnified by the
lenses of pain or temper. It usually pleased her injured mood to make
waffles on wash-day, and the hen-house owed many renovations, with a
reckless upsetting of nests and roosts, to one of her "splittin'
headaches." She would often wash her hair in view of impending company,
although she averred that to wet her scalp never failed to bring on the
"neuraligy." And her "neuraligy" in turn meant medicine for the deacon.

It was probably the doctor's timely advice, augmented, possibly, by the
potencies of the frying-pan, with a strong underlying sympathy with the
worrying woman within--it was, no doubt, all these powers combined that
suddenly surprised the hitherto complying husband into such
unprecedented conduct that any one knowing him in his old character, and
seeing him now, w