Why, old Mrs. Jarvis she made it for the fair and it wan't sold. 'Twas
one of them log-cabin quilts, you know. I don't know why they call 'em
log cabins, they don't look no more like a log cabin than my head does.
I cal'late they have to call 'em somethin' so's to tell 'em from the
risin' sun quilts and the mornin'-glory quilts and--and the
Lord-knows-what quilts. The womenfolks make mo-ore kinds of them quilts
and comforters, seems so, than----

"Eh? Oh, yes, I'm beatin' up to Egbert, Cap'n Sears; I'll be alongside
him in a minute, give me steerage way. Well, the log-cabin quilt wan't
sold and they wanted to sell it, partly because old Mrs. Jarvis would
feel bad if nobody bought it, and partly because the meetin'-house folks
would feel worse if any money got away from 'em at a fair. So Mr. Dishup
he says, 'We'll auction of it off,' he says, 'and our honored and
beloved friend, Mr. Phillips, will maybe so be kind enough to act as
auctioneer.' So Eg, he got up and apologized for bein' chose, and went
on to say what a all-'round no-good auctioneer he'd be but how he
couldn't say no to the folks of the church where his dear diseased wife
had worshiped so long, and then he started in to sell that comforter.
Did he _sell_ it? Why, creepin', crawlin', hoppin' ... Cap'n Sears, he
could have sold a shipload of them log-cabins if he'd had 'em handy. He
held the thing up in front of 'em, so they tell me, and he just praised
it up same as John B. Gough praises up cold water at a temp'rance
lecture. He told how the old woman had worked over it, and set up nights
over it, and got her nerves all into a titter and her finger ends all
rags, as you might say, and how she had done it just to do somethin' for
the meetin'-house she thought so much of, the church that her loved and
lost husband used to come to so reg'lar. _That_ was all fiddlesticks,
'cause Cap'n Az never went to church except for the six weeks after he
was married, and pretty scattern' 'long the last three of _them_.

"Well, he hadn't talked that way very long afore he had that whole
vestry as damp as a fishin' schooner's deck in a Banks fog. All
hands--even the men that had been spendin' money for the fair things,
tidies and aprons and splint work picture-frames and such, even they was
cryin'. And then old Mrs. Jarvis--and she was cryin', too--she went and
whispered to the minister and he whispered to Phillips and Phillips, he
says: 'Ladies and gentlemen,' he says, 'I ha