Explore "Alas, the Poor Whiffletit!" by Irvin S. Cobb on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Over Jefferson Poindexter's usually buoyant spirits a fabric of gloom, / black, thick, and heavy, was spread like a burying-pall. His thoughts / were the color of twelve o'clock at night at the bottom of a coal-mine / and it the dark of the moon. Moroseness crowned his brow; sorrow berode / his soul, and on his under lip the bull-bat, that eccentric bird which / has to sit lengthwise of the limb, might have perched with room to / spare. You couldn't see the ointment for the flies, and Gilead had gone / out of the balm business. There was a reason. The reason was Ophelia / Stubblefield.
On an upturned watering-piggin alongside Mittie May's stall in the / stable back of the house, Jeff sat and just naturally gloomed. To this / retreat he had been harried against his will. Out of her domain, which / was the kitchen, Aunt Dilsey had driven him with words barbed and / bitter.