"Try it," he said; and then Aunt Lyddy, after she had swallowed it, laughed to think what a tableau they had made--a man who had been in the State-prison standing over her with a great knife! And then she laughed again.
"It popped into my head, supposing Susan should have looked in at the south window and Joshua into the door, when you was feeding out that oyster to me, what they would have thought!"
Eph laughed, too, and, surely enough, just then a stout, light-haired, rather plain-looking young woman came up to the south window and leaned in. She had on a sun-bonnet, which had not prevented her from securing a few choice freckles. She had been working with a trowel in her flower-garden.
"What's the matter?" she said, nodding easily to Eph. "What do you two always find to laugh about?"
"Ephraim was feeding me with spoon-meat," said Aunt Lyddy, pointing to the basket, which looked like a basket of anthracite coal.
"It looks like spoon-meat," said Susan, and then she laughed too. "I'll roast some of them for supper," she added, "a new way that I know."
Eph was not invited to stay to supper, but he stayed, none the less: that was always understood.
"Well! Well! Well!" said Joshua, coming to the door-step, and washing his hands and arms just outside, in a tin basin. "I thought I see you set down a parcel of oysters--but there was seaweed over 'em, and I don' know's I could hev said they was oysters; but then, if the square question hed been put to me, 'Mr. Carr, be them oysters or not?' I s'pose I should hev said they was; still, if they'd asked me how I knew--"
"Come, come, father!" said Aunt Lyddy, "do give poor Ephraim a little peace. Why don't you just say you thought they were oysters, and done with it?"
"Say I _thought_ they was?" he replied, innocently. "I knew well enough they was--that is--knew? No, I didn't know, but--"
Aunt Lyddy, with an air of mock resignation, gave up, while Joshua endeavored to fix, to a hair, the exact extent of his knowledge.
Eph smiled; but he remembered what would have made him pardon, a thousand times over, the old man's garrulousness. He remembered who alone had never failed, once a year, to visit a certain prisoner, at the cost of a long and tiresome journey, and who had written to that homesick prisoner kind and cheering letters, and had sent him baskets of simple dainties for holidays.