thing! all the way over here on that
winter night, and said, 'Mr. Pearson, you're all the friend I've got,
and I want you to save my boy,' why, you see I was selfish as ever I
could be in takin' of you. Your mother's cryin' sot me a-cryin' too.
We're all selfish in everything, akordin' to my tell. Blamed ef we
ha'n't, Miss Hawkins, only sometimes I'd think you was real benev'lent
ef I didn't know we war all selfish."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: Absurd as this speech seems, it is a literal transcript of
words spoken in the author's presence by a woman who, like Miss Hawkins,
was born in Massachusetts.]

[Footnote 20: When the first edition of this book appeared, the critic
who analyzed the dialect in _The Nation_ confessed that he did not know
what to "crate" meant. It was a custom in the days of early Indiana
barbarism for the youngsters of a village, on spying a sleeping
drunkard, to hunt up a "queensware crate"--one of the cages of round
withes in which crockery was shipped. This was turned upside down over
the inebriate, and loaded with logs or any other heavy articles that
would make escape difficult when the poor wretch should come to himself.
It was a sort of rude punishment for inebriety, and it afforded a
frog-killing delight to those who executed justice.]

CHAPTER XII.

THE HARDSHELL PREACHER.

"They's preachin' down to Bethel Meetin'-house to-day," said the Squire
at breakfast. Twenty years In the West could not cure Squire Hawkins of
saying "to" for "at." "I rather guess as how the old man Bosaw will give
pertickeler fits to our folks to-day." For Squire Hawkins, having been
expelled from the "Hardshell" church of which Mr. Bosaw was pastor, for
the grave offense of joining a temperance society, had become a member
of the "Reformers," the very respectable people who now call themselves
"Disciples," but whom the profane will persist in calling
"Campbellites." They had a church in the village of Clifty, three miles
away.

I know that explanations are always abominable to story readers, as they
are to story writers, but as so many of my readers have never had the
inestimable privilege of sitting under the gospel as it is ministered in
enlightened neighborhoods like Flat Creek, I find myself under the
necessity--need-cessity the Rev. Mr. Bosaw would call it--of rising to
explain. Some people think the "Hardshells" a myth, and some sensitive
Baptist people at the East resent all allusion to them.