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Wildfire: Why, madam, of all the fellers either side of the Alleghany hills, I myself can jump higher—squat lower—dive deeper—stay longer under and come out drier.
Mrs. Wollope: Here's amelioration! And your ladies, sir?
Wildfire: The galls! Oh, they go it on the big figure too—no mistake in them. There's my late sweetheart, Patty Snaggs. At nine year old she shot a bear, and now she can whip her weight in wild cats. There's the skin of one of 'em. [Takes off his cap.]
Mrs. Wollope: Feminine accomplishments! Doubtless your soil and people correspond.
Wildfire: The soil—oh, the soil's so rich you may travel under it ... Look you here now, tother day, I was ahorseback, paddling away pretty comfortably through No-bottom Swamp, when suddenly—I wish I may be curry-comb'd to death by 50,000 tomcats, if I didn't see a white hat getting along in mighty considerable style all alone by itself on the top of the mud—so up I rid, and being a bit jubus, I lifted it with the butt end of my whip when a feller sung out from under it, "Hallo, stranger, who told you to knock my hat off?"
*A novel about Kentucky published in 1832, not to be confused with Charles Kingsley's Elizabethan romance of the same name (1855).