"After a while he says: 'Bunk, if you don't mind my telling you, your
company begins to cloy slightly. I've got to write an article on the
Chimera of Communism for a magazine, and attend a meeting of the Race
Track Association this afternoon. Of course you understand by now that
you can't get my proxy for your Remedy, whatever it may be.'

"Well, sir, all I could think of to do was to go out and get in the
buggy. The horse turned round and took me back to the hotel. I hitched
him and went in to see Andy. In his room I told him about this farmer,
word for word; and I sat picking at the table cover like one bereft of
sagaciousness.

"'I don't understand it,' says I, humming a sad and foolish little
song to cover my humiliation.

"Andy walks up and down the room for a long time, biting the left end
of his mustache as he does when in the act of thinking.

"'Jeff,' says he, finally, 'I believe your story of this expurgated
rustic; but I am not convinced. It looks incredulous to me that he
could have inoculated himself against all the preordained systems
of bucolic bunco. Now, you never regarded me as a man of special
religious proclivities, did you, Jeff?' says Andy.

"'Well,' says I, 'No. But,' says I, not to wound his feelings, 'I have
also observed many church members whose said proclivities were not so
outwardly developed that they would show on a white handkerchief if
you rubbed 'em with it.'