“Of course,” you'd say, “I'm not real well acquainted with mummies, and I'll take your word Hannah's a good specimen of her kind, only I'd call her laying out pretty economic and bunchy; and of course she's not in it with an Egyptian mummy for a minute, but we won't quarrel about that, though on the outside she's pretty much like a bag of meal, and when opened up, the difference is all in favour of the bag of meal; but that isn't the point---” and so on. Give him an opening, and he'd shed knowledge like rain off a roof, till you felt glad to be alive.
Or else I would go off with Susannah and help her write her poem on me. That poetry was so candid that it got away from me. It soared off on the wings of truth, and dealt too much with pure facts. My nose not being straight, it stated the fact, not brutally, but simply. Any weakness I had, and there was a rhyme for it, down it went, and if there wasn't a rhyme, she just planted it in the beginning of the line instead of at the end. Technical difficulties never balked her of that. There were one thousand, two hundred and fourteen lines before we got to California. I wouldn't take a fortune for that poem. It was more than a photograph. It fitted me like the skin of a snake. But that's not its main value.
“Handsome!” I said, feeling interested. Susannah took an observation.
“Then you oughtn't to say 'so' when you mean 'some.'”
But I was new at literary criticism or I wouldn't have made that mistake. It went on:
“Not at all, Susannah! Neat and cleanly!”
which shows the value of literary criticism.
Then the poem went through with the circumstances of the Portate Ultimatum, the Hannah Atkins plot, and the sequel of those complications.
Now, from that point on, it went along something like a diary. It recorded daily incidents, reflections, comments, the shades and modifications of Susannah's opinion of me. It was minute, microscopic, and detailed. It went into unsuspected corners, and hauled things out, and delivered judgments on them. If the book of the Recording Angel is put together on that model, it's surely a good model. Perhaps the first sight of the record and analysis will make a man squirm. But I wouldn't ask for a better Recording Angel than Susannah, or a judge on the whole more just. But that is not the main value of the poem to me. It began to strike me in a new light when I discovered that Susannah had my sins on her conscience.