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I dare say you will partly guess the story of Benny's misfortune, but for the sake of those who are not good guessers, I shall tell you that he had taken a fancy to cut across a corner of the Kingsbury farm that morning, to make the distance to his grandmother's shorter, in his unwise fashion, never considering that climbing walls and fences, paddling through the marshy meadows and contriving to get over the ditch would more than overbalance the few steps he saved.
This I attribute largely to a merry disposition and a ready desire to please, together with a very genial indifference if, by any chance, the maid should prove disdainful. For it may be taken as a general principle that maids are the less tempted to be disdainful if they guess and they are shrewd guessers that their disdain will be met with a blithe carelessness.
And speaking of reporting I know already that a lot of you astronomical guessers have only the faintest possible idea of where you really are, plus, minus, or lateral; and if you don't get yourselves straightened out before we get to W41, I'm going to make a report on my own account that will jar some of you birds loose from your upper teeth!"
He usually understands English, too, and those who can not are remarkably accurate guessers, and all take a friendly interest in your inquiries instead of giving you a short answer and a cold shoulder like the policemen in our cities.
He was not too sure he succeeded, but it was a relief to talk about it. He could almost feel himself dropping into the routine that he used in the orientation courses for young Guessers who had been assigned to him for protection and instruction.
To heighten the excitement and confuse the guessers, a number of dry poles are laid before each platoon, upon which the members of the party "in hand" beat furiously with short staves, keeping time to the choral chant already mentioned, which waxes fast and furious as the game proceeds. As large bets are staked upon the game, the excitement is prodigious.
Indeed, that he himself, was a small, but significant part of that answer. The Misfits had no Guessers. That was a fact that The Guesser knew from personal experience. He had been in space battles with Misfit fleets, and he had brought the Naipor through those battles unscathed while wreaking havoc and destruction among the massed ships of the Misfits. They had no Guessers.
The geocentric system of astronomy, with its eccentrics and its epicycles, was an hypothesis utterly at variance with fact, which nevertheless did great things for the advancement of astronomical knowledge. Kepler was the wildest of guessers.
This was in itself extraordinary since the area was so small and the population so settled, but shrewd guessers were nearly hitting the mark when they supposed, from certain memories, inferences, and coincidences, that the child belonged to Miss Clairville, and this was precisely the point which offended the store-keeper; had the affair originated in his own parish, no matter how disreputably, he would have guarded the secret, striven to make the best of it, or, if the case abounded in direct violations of morality by those above him in station, all the more he would have preserved an absolutely rigid silence.
"Keepin' mum, eh?" he said. "Well, that's all right. I cal'late we're pretty good guessers, some of us, anyway. Jim," with a sudden look straight at the youngest member of his neighbor's family, who was fidgeting with his spoon and acting remarkably nervous, "what have you got to say? Have a good time in that parlor playin' pirates, did you?" Jimmie gasped.
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