Samantha at Saratoga [12]
a despondent and sorrowful smile, and I kissed her warmly. I like Ardelia. And what I said, I said for her good, and she knew it. I like Ardelia. Well, Miss Tutt and Ardelia went from our house to Eben Pixley's. They are distant relatives of hern, and live about 3 quarters of a mile from us. The Pixleys think everything of Ardelia but they can't bear her mother. There has been difficulties in the family. But Ardelia stayed there mor'n two weeks right along. She haint very happy to home I believe. And before she went back home it wuz arranged that she should teach the winter's school and board to Miss Pixley's. But Miss Pixley wuz took sick with the tyfus before she had been there two weeks -- and, for all the world, if the deestrict didn't want us to board her. Josiah hadn't much to do, so he could carry her back and forth in stormy weather, and it wuz her wish to come. And it wuz Josiah's wish too, for the pay wuz good, and the work light -- for him. And so I consented after a parlay. But I didn't regret it. She is a good little creeter and no more like her mother than a feather bed is like a darnin' needle. I like Ardelia: so does Josiah.
III. THE CHERITY OF THE JONESVILLIANS.
We have been havin' a pound party here in Jonesville. There wuz a lot of children left without any father or mother, nobody only an old grandma to take care of 'em, and she wuz half bent with the rheumatiz, and had a swelled neck, and lumbago and fits. They lived in an old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville. The father wuz, I couldn't deny, a shiftless sort of a chap, good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn'nt no faculty. And I don't know, come to think of it, as anybody is any more to blame if they are born without a faculty, than if they are born with only one eye. Faculty is one of the things that you can't buy. He loved to hunt. That is, he loved to hunt some kinds of things. He never loved to hunt stiddy, hard work, and foller on the trail of it till he evertook success and captured it. No, he druther hunt after catamounts and painters, in woods where catamounts haint mounted, and painters haint painted sence he wuz born. He generally killed nothin' bigger than red squirrels and chipmunks. The biggest game he ever brought down wuz himself. He shot himself one cold day in the fall of the year. He wuz gettin' over a brush fence, they s'posed the gun hit against somethin' and went off, for they found him a layin' dead at the bottom of the fence. I always s'posed that the shock of his death comin' so awful sudden unto her, killed his wife. She had been sick for a long spell, she had consumption and dropsy, and so forth, and so forth, for a long time, and after he wuz brought in dead, she didn't live a week. She thought her eyes of him, for no earthly reason as I could ever see. How strange, how strange a dispensation of Providence it duz seem, that some women love some men, and vicy versey and the same. But she did jest about worship him, and she died whisperin' his name, and reachin' out her hands as if she see him jest ahead of her. And I told Josiah I didn't know but she did. I shouldn't wonder a mite if she did see him, for there is only the veil of mystery between us and the other world at any time, and she had got so nigh to it, that I s'pose it got so thin that she could see through it. Just as you can see through the blue haze that lays before our forest in Injun summer. Come nigh up to it and you can see the silvery trunks of the maples and the red sumac leaves, and the bright evergreens, and the forms of the happy hunters a passin' along under the glint of the sunbeams and the soft shadows. They died in Injun summer. I made a wreath myself of the bright-colored leaves to lay on their coffins. Dead leaves, dead to all use and purpose here, and yet with the bright mysterious glow upon them that put me in mind of some immortal destiny and blossoming beyond our poor dim vision. Jane Smedley wuz a good woman, and so wuz Jim, good but shiftless. But I made the same wreath for
III. THE CHERITY OF THE JONESVILLIANS.
We have been havin' a pound party here in Jonesville. There wuz a lot of children left without any father or mother, nobody only an old grandma to take care of 'em, and she wuz half bent with the rheumatiz, and had a swelled neck, and lumbago and fits. They lived in an old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville. The father wuz, I couldn't deny, a shiftless sort of a chap, good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn'nt no faculty. And I don't know, come to think of it, as anybody is any more to blame if they are born without a faculty, than if they are born with only one eye. Faculty is one of the things that you can't buy. He loved to hunt. That is, he loved to hunt some kinds of things. He never loved to hunt stiddy, hard work, and foller on the trail of it till he evertook success and captured it. No, he druther hunt after catamounts and painters, in woods where catamounts haint mounted, and painters haint painted sence he wuz born. He generally killed nothin' bigger than red squirrels and chipmunks. The biggest game he ever brought down wuz himself. He shot himself one cold day in the fall of the year. He wuz gettin' over a brush fence, they s'posed the gun hit against somethin' and went off, for they found him a layin' dead at the bottom of the fence. I always s'posed that the shock of his death comin' so awful sudden unto her, killed his wife. She had been sick for a long spell, she had consumption and dropsy, and so forth, and so forth, for a long time, and after he wuz brought in dead, she didn't live a week. She thought her eyes of him, for no earthly reason as I could ever see. How strange, how strange a dispensation of Providence it duz seem, that some women love some men, and vicy versey and the same. But she did jest about worship him, and she died whisperin' his name, and reachin' out her hands as if she see him jest ahead of her. And I told Josiah I didn't know but she did. I shouldn't wonder a mite if she did see him, for there is only the veil of mystery between us and the other world at any time, and she had got so nigh to it, that I s'pose it got so thin that she could see through it. Just as you can see through the blue haze that lays before our forest in Injun summer. Come nigh up to it and you can see the silvery trunks of the maples and the red sumac leaves, and the bright evergreens, and the forms of the happy hunters a passin' along under the glint of the sunbeams and the soft shadows. They died in Injun summer. I made a wreath myself of the bright-colored leaves to lay on their coffins. Dead leaves, dead to all use and purpose here, and yet with the bright mysterious glow upon them that put me in mind of some immortal destiny and blossoming beyond our poor dim vision. Jane Smedley wuz a good woman, and so wuz Jim, good but shiftless. But I made the same wreath for