ever green
and the sap runnin' in him same as spring. But hurry me along, I don't
want to miss nothin' of this oyster party, and mebbe ef you kin set me
right about in the middle of the new Sunday-school room, I kin sort er
reckon on what's goin' on."

The two women then moved so rapidly down the street that they almost ran
into a man who was hobbling in the opposite direction leaning on a
cane; his face as dry of any human emotion as though it had been a
squeezed-out dishcloth. He was attempting to move past the wheeled chair
without speaking, when a claw hand reached out after him. "Scared of a
female past eighty, Miner Hobbs," the old voice cheered. "Ain't it a
God's blessing no woman has run off with you--yet?"

Still at the gate the smile that greeted the approach of this dried-up
little man was as radiant as the love of a woman.

"It's mortal good of you, Miner, to be goin' to the oyster show with me
to-night, bein's as how you hate gatherin's," Ambrose began
affectionately; "you've done give up a heap of tastes fer me first and
last, ain't you, old friend? Now ef you'll wait here for me a few
moments longer I'll be wholly ready to join you, for I kinder thought
I'd like to speak with a few friends before the supper begins."

Ambrose started hastily back toward his front door with such an
unmistakably jaunty air, such a forgetting of his rheumatic joints, that
Miner's ferret eyes gleamed upon him suspiciously. Besides, was he not
wearing an historic long coat, a strangely rusty stovepipe hat, and a
white starched shirt over which his large lavender silk tie was crossed
like a breastplate, and was he not also revealing yards of newly gray
trousered legs?

"You wasn't aimin' to speak to no one in particular, was ye?" Miner
inquired.

The long man stopped, noticeably blushing, and then, although the rest
of his face remained grave, his eyes twinkled. "S'pose you don't know,
Miner, how hard it is sometimes not to lie to the folks you love just
because you love 'em? The Widow Tarwater druv past here a few minutes
agone, she that was Peachy Williams, and though I ain't had more'n a
bowin' acquaintance with her fer nigh forty years, knowin' that the
Honourable Jones and our new Baptist preacher the Rev. Elias Tupper, are
both after her, I kinder thought I'd like to see which one she favours
the most."

Then Ambrose went quickly inside his cottage while Miner patiently
waited on the outside, understanding that th