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.’”

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.”