It was along in the winter, and the prominent church members were having a
business meeting in the basement of the church to devise ways and means to
pay for the pulpit furniture. The question of an oyster sociable had been
decided, and they got to talking about oysters, and one old deaconess
asked a deacon if he didn't think raw oysters would go further at a
sociable, than stewed oysters.
[Illustration: THE WANDERING OYSTER.]
He said he thought raw oysters would go further, but they wouldn't be as
satisfying. And then he went on to tell how far a raw oyster went once
with him. He said he was at a swell dinner party with a lady on each side
of him, and he was trying to talk to both of them, or carry on two
conversations, on two different subjects at the same time.
They had some shell oysters, and he took up one on a fork--a
large, fat one--and was about to put it in his mouth, when the lady on his
left called his attention, and when the cold fork struck his teeth, and no
oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He
went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced
down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster,
though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone down
his vest under the waistband of his clothing, and he was powerless to
arrest its progress.
He said he never felt how powerless he was until he tried to grab that
oyster by placing his hand on his person, outside his clothes; then, as
the oyster slipped around from one place to another, he felt that man was
only a poor, weak creature.
The oyster, he observed, had very cold feet, and the more he tried to be
calm and collected, the more the oyster seemed to walk around among his
vitals.
He says he does not know whether the ladies noticed the oyster when it
started on its travels or not, but he thought, as he leaned back and tried
to loosen up his clothing, so it would hurry down toward his shoes, that
they winked at each other, though they might have been winking at
something else.
The oyster seemed to be real spry until it got out of reach, and then it
got to going slow as the slikery covering wore off, and by the time it had
worked into his trousers leg, it was going very slow, though it remained
cold to the last, and he hailed the arrival of that oyster into the heel
of his stocking with more delight than he did the raising of the American
flag over Vicksburg, after the long siege.