I got back
home with him it seemed like the hull town was there. It was along about
dusk by this time, and it was a prayer-meeting night at the church.
Mr. Cartwright told his wife to tell the folks what come to the
prayer-meeting he'd be back before long, and to wait fur him. Which she
really told them where he had went, and what fur. Mr. Cartwright
marches right into the kitchen. All the chairs in our house was into the
kitchen, and the women was a-talking and a-laughing, and they had sent
over to Alexanderses for their chairs and to Rogerses for theirn. Every
oncet in a while they would be a awful bust of language come up from
that hole where that unreginerate old sinner was cooped up in.

I have travelled around considerable since them days, and I have mixed
up along of many kinds of people in many different places, and some
of 'em was cussers to admire. But I never hearn such cussing before or
since as old Hank done that night. He busted his own records and riz
higher'n his own water marks for previous times. I wasn't nothing but
a little kid then, and skeercly fitten fur to admire the full beauty of
it. They was deep down cusses, that come from the heart. Looking back
at it after all these years, I can believe what Brother Cartwright said
himself that night, that it wasn't natcheral cussing and some higher
power, like a demon or a evil sperrit, must of entered into Hank's human
carkis and give that turrible eloquence to his remarks. It busted out
every few minutes, and the women would put their fingers into their ears
till a spell was over. And it was personal, too. Hank, he would listen
until he hearn a woman's voice that he knowed, and then he would let
loose on her fambly, going backwards to her grandfathers and downwards
to her children's children. If her father had once stolen a hog, or her
husband done any disgrace that got found out on him, Hank would put it
all into his gineral remarks, with trimmings onto it.

Brother Cartwright, he steps up to the hole in the floor when he first
comes in and he says, gentle-like and soothing, like a undertaker when he
tells you where to set at a home funeral:

"Brother Walters."

"Brother!" Hank yells out, "don't ye brother me, you sniffling,
psalm-singing, yaller-faced, pigeon-toed hippercrit, you! Get me a
ladder, gol dern you, and I'll come out'n here and learn you to brother
me, I will." Only that wasn't nothing to what Hank really said to that
preacher; no more