Euphemia and I exclaimed, with one voice, against this. We had just reached the most exciting part, and, I added, we had heard nothing yet about that affair of the taxes.
"You see, sir," said Pomona, "it took me so long to write out the chapters about my birth, my parentage, and my early adventures, that I hadn't time to finish up the rest. But I can tell you what happened after that jus' as well as if I had writ it out." And so she went on, much more glibly than before, with the account of the doings of the lightning-rod man.
"There was that wretch on top of the house, a-fixin' his old rods and hammerin' away for dear life. He'd brought his ladder over the side fence, where the dog a-barkin' and plungin' at the boy outside, couldn't see him. I stood dumb for a minute, an' then I know'd I had him. I rushed into the house, got a piece of well-rope, tied it to the bull-dog's collar, an' dragged him out and fastened him to the bottom rung of the ladder. Then I walks over to the front fence with Lord Edward's chain, for I knew that if he got at that bull-dog there'd be times, for they'd never been allowed to see each other yet. So says I to the boy, 'I'm goin' to tie up the dog, so you needn't be afraid of his jumpin' over the fence,'—which he couldn't do, or the boy would have been a corpse for twenty minutes, or may be half an hour. The boy kinder laughed, and said I needn't mind, which I didn't. Then I went to the gate, and I clicked to the horse which was standin' there, an' off he starts, as good as gold, an' trots down the road. The boy, he said somethin' or other pretty bad, an' away he goes after him; but the horse was a-trottin' real fast, an' had a good start."
"How on earth could you ever think of doing
155
