th
Christmas for Elviry and little Anderson in his saddlebags.

* * * * *

When they found Anse Dugmore in his ambush another snow had fallen on
his back and he was slightly more of a skeleton than ever; but the bony
finger was still crooked about the trigger, the rusted hammer was back
at full cock and there was a dried brownish stain on the gun stock. So,
from these facts, his finders were moved to conclude that the freed
convict must have bled to death from his lungs before the sheriff ever
passed, which they held to be a good thing all round and a lucky thing
for the sheriff.

VII

TO THE EDITOR OF THE SUN

There was a sound, heard in the early hours of a Sunday morning, that
used to bother strangers in our town until they got used to it. It
started usually along about half past five or six o'clock and it kept up
interminably--so it seemed to them--a monotonous, jarring thump-thump,
thump-thump that was like the far-off beating of African tomtoms; but at
breakfast, when the beaten biscuits came upon the table, throwing off a
steamy hot halo of their own goodness, these aliens knew what it was
that had roused them, and, unless they were dyspeptics by nature, felt
amply recompensed for the lost hours of their beauty sleep.

In these degenerate latter days I believe there is a machine that
accomplishes the same purpose noiselessly by a process of rolling and
crushing, which no doubt is efficacious; but it seems somehow to take
the poetry out of the operation. Old Judge Priest, our circuit judge,
and the reigning black deity of his kitchen, Aunt Dilsey Turner, would
have naught of it. So long as his digestion survived and her good right
arm held out to endure, there would be real beaten biscuits for the
judge's Sunday morning breakfast. And so, having risen with the dawn or
a little later, Aunt Dilsey, wielding a maul-headed tool of whittled
wood, would pound the dough with rhythmic strokes until it was as
plastic as sculptor's modeling clay and as light as eiderdown, full of
tiny hills and hollows, in which small yeasty bubbles rose and spread
and burst like foam globules on the flanks of gentle wavelets. Then,
with her master hand, she would roll it thin and cut out the small round
disks and delicately pink each one with a fork--and then, if you were
listening, you could hear the stove door slam like the smacking of an
iron lip.

On a certain Sunday I have in mind, Judge