"No, ma'am. Neither'd anybody else."
"Why is it, Mr. Martin?" asked Miss Selina.
"It's like the Creator's sayin', 'Let there be light.' He says, 'Let
ladies be lovely--'" (Miss Tibbs bowed)--"and 'Let men-folks be honest--
sometimes;' and, 'Let fat people be held up to ridicule till they fall
off.' You can't tell why it is; it was jest ordained that-a-way."
The room was so crowded that the juvenile portion of the assemblage was
ensconced in the windows. Strange to say, the youth of Plattville were not
present under protest, as their fellows of a metropolis would have been,
lectures being well understood by the young of great cities to have
instructive tendencies. The boys came to-night because they insisted upon
coming. It was an event. Some of them had made sacrifices to come,
enduring even the agony (next to hair-cutting in suffering) of having
their ears washed. Conscious of parental eyes, they fronted the public
with boyhood's professional expressionlessness, though they communicated
with each other aside in a cipher-language of their own, and each group
was a hot-bed of furtive gossip and sarcastic comment. Seated in the
windows, they kept out what small breath of air might otherwise have
stolen in to comfort the audience.
Their elders sat patiently dripping with perspiration, most of the
gentlemen undergoing the unusual garniture of stiffly-starched collars,
those who had not cultivated chin beards to obviate such arduous
necessities of pomp and state, hardly bearing up under the added anxiety
of cravats.
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