sat in the arm-chair in
the "spare room," staring out of the window, and trying to think up the
speech he was to make that day. For he had been chosen by the
town-committee to open the exercises upon the stand with an appropriate
oration; and though he had mused and muttered and studied over it, from
the day when he was first requested to "perform" until this eventful
morning itself, he had not yet succeeded in composing a speech which
satisfied him.

"The flies bother the horses so, I can't practice on it in the field,
and my only chance is o' nights," he had often explained to his wife;
but his nightly meditations on it had been disturbed by such foreign
remarks as this:

"I say, Eb" (that was her family name for him; away from home she always
said "Deacon"), "you haint gone off to sleep, be you? I should feel
masterly cut up ef my cake should be heavy, an' everybody on the grounds
will know it's mine from the marks o' my name I'm goin' to put on the
frostin',"--by which she meant her initials done in red, white, and blue
powdered sugar.

And again:

"Do you remember Mis' Deacon Pogue's pound-cake at the d'nation party
las' winter? She'd bragged on it to every livin' soul, an', when they
came to cut it, there was a solid streak of dough right through the
middle from eend to eend. She didn't happin to be 'round when 'twas cut,
an' I thought it was my duty to let her see a piece, so she'd know how
to better it next time, and she was so mad, she's turned up her nose at
me ever sence."

The Deacon here murmured something beginning "Ninthly," for he had
arranged his speech in heads; but she kept on with such inspiring
memories, that he had poor chance to get up that "Speech by Deacon
Dodson," the sight of which legend on the printed programme had aroused
in him a fixed determination to do or die. But it seemed to him, as he
sat there, that it would be die; for not one "head" could he call up
clearly, and ever and anon his wife would cry out for wood or water, or
to state some fact concerning her cake or chickens.

Just now her rusk was the all-absorbing topic of thought. More than
twenty times she had looked at the dough and reported its "rise" to the
unsympathetic Deacon, who was pumping his arms up and down, and trying
to disentangle his "firstly" and "secondly."

"The procession is going to form at nine o'clock punctial, and march to
the grounds, and so there's no use of dressing Bubby twice," Mrs. Dodson
had