WALL, sometimes a lot of us old codgers used to git down to Ezra Hoskins' grossery store and we'd sot 'round and chaw terbacker and whittle¹ sticks and eat crackers² and cheese and proons and anything Ezra happened to have layin' 'round loos, and then we'd git to spinnin' yarns³ that would jist about put Annanias and Safiry right out of business if they wuz here now. Wall, one afternoon we wuz all settin' 'round spinnin' yarns when Deacon Witherspoon sed that eckos wuz mighty⁵ peculiar⁶ things, cos down whar he wuz born and raised thar wuz a passell of hills cum together and you couldn't git out thar and talk louder 'n a whisper on account of the ecko. But one day a summer boarder what wuz thar remarked as how he wasn't afraid to talk right out in meetin' in front of any old lot of hills what wuz ever created; so he went out and hollered jist as loud as he could holler, and he started a ecko a-goin' and it flew up agin one hill and bounced off onto another one and gittin' bigger and louder all the time 'til it got back whar it started from and hit a stone quarry⁷ and knocked off a piece of stone and hit that feller in the head, and he didn't cum too fer over three hours. Wall, we thought that wuz purty good fer a Deacon. Wall, none of us sed anything fer a right smart spell and then Si Pettingill remarked "he didn't know anything about eckos, but he calculated he'd seen some mighty peculiar things; sed he guessed he'd seen it rain 'bout⁴ as hard as anybody ever seen it rain." Someone sed, "Wall, Si, how hard did you ever see it rain?" and he sed, "Wall one day last summer do............