"And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?" she demanded.

"Why--why--because, girl, I am deafer than the devil's dam! I cannot
fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for
ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office."

Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her
pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he
had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten
with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile.
She responded, however, with something of her mother's indirection.

"Under your favor, sir, you don't know how deaf the devil's dam may
be--and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I'm sure it reminds
me of that man they call 'X,'--a sort of churl person,--who talks of the
devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if--as if he were a
native."

This was a turning of the sword of the pious "X" upon himself with a
vengeance, for he was prone in his spiritual disquisitions to detail
much of the discomfort of the future state that awaited his careless
friends.

The allusion so far pleased old Mivane, who resented a suspected
relegation of himself to a warm station in the schemes of "X," that,
although his head was still bald and shining like a billiard ball, he
suffered himself to drop into his chair, his stick resting motionless on
the long-suffering puncheon floor.

"If I could only hear for a day I'd forgive twenty soundless years!" he