"Oh, my Lord! I presume she’s dancin’ a whole lot over to Ervay. She
packed her ball-gown in a gripsack and lit out of here two days ago,
p’inting that way. A locomotive couldn’t stop her none if she got a chance
to go cycloning round a dance."

In the mean time, the two hogs having failed to grasp the fact that they
were _de trop_, continued to doze.

"Come, girls, get up," coaxed Johnnie, persuasively. "Maude, I don’t know
when I see you so lazy. Run on, honey—run on with Ethel." For Ethel, the
piebald hog, finally did as she was bid.

Mary Carmichael could not resist the temptation of asking how the hogs
happened to have such unusual names.

"To tell the truth, I done it to aggravate my wife. When I finds myself a
discard in the matrimonial shuffle, I figgers on a new deal that’s going
to inclood one or two anxieties for my lady partner—to which end—viz.,
namely, I calls one hawg Ethel and the other hawg Maude, allowing to my
wife that they’re named after lady friends in the East. Them lady friends
might be the daughters of Ananias and Sapphira, for all they ever
happened, but they answers the purpose of riling her same as if they were
eating their three squares daily. I have hopes, everything else failing,
that she may yet quit dancing and settle down to the sanctity of the home
out of pure jealousy of them two proxy hawgs."

"I can just tell you this," interrupted the fat lady: "I don’t enjoy
occupying premises after hawgs, no matter how fashionable you name ’em. A
hawg’s a hawg, with manners according, if it’s named after the President
of the United States or the King of England."