Thursday mornin’ found me to the depott in good season. Betsey also was on time. I didn’t feel haughty nor at all proud, but still I felt that I was a independent householder startin’ to New York village on a tower at my own expense. I see that all the car folks felt friendly towards me for thier was a pleasant smile on their faces every time they looked at me and Betsey.
I wasn’t trimmed off so much as Betsey, but I looked well. I had on that good calico dress, a large black silk mantilly, a good shirred silk bunnet large enough to shade my face some, my bran new cotton gloves, my veil and my umbrell.
Betsey, I always thought put on too much to look well, howsomever everybody to their own mind. She had on a pale blue parmetta dress, with flounces and puckers onto it, a overskirt and a greek bender of the same, trimmed with checkered delain, out on a biasin’, a close fittin’ bask of the delain, which was pink and yellow plaid and which was pinked out on the edge with a machine. She had on a white bobbinet lace hat, jest big enough to cover her bump of self-esteem, trimmed with red and yellow roses and long ends of otter colored ribbon and white lace, then she had long cornelian ear rings, a string of beads round her neck, and a locket and a big blue breast pin and a cornelian cross. A pair of new white cotton gloves, trimmed with two rows of broad white cotton edgin’ five cents a yard--for I seen her buy it--and two horsehair bracelets. And with her new teeth and her long bran new tow curls, and waterfalls and frizzles all full of otter colored rosettes, I tell you she looked gay.
“I don’t know but what you think I am foolish Josiah Allen’s wife, in enrobing myself in my best a coming on the road. But these are my sentiments. I knew we should get theah before night, and I should proceed at once to Ebinezah’s, and if anything should be a happening, if it should be the house of mourning, I thought it would be so comforting to Ebinezah, to see me looking beautiful and cheerful. Yon know theah is everything in first impressions. I mean of course,” she added hastily, “that I am that sorry for poor lonely widdowers and especially Ebinezah, that if I could be a comfort to them, I would be willing to sacrifice a tablespoonful of my heart’s best blood, much moah this blue parmetta dress. These are my sentiments Josiah Allen’s wife.”