But as I was a sayin’ I stood silently in the door, to see old Slimpsey go by a horseback, and I thought to myself as I pensively turned out my tea grounds, (I was a gettin’ dinner) how much--how much it looks like a night mare that has broke out of its lawful night pastures, and is runnin’ away with a pale and harassed victim. So haggard and melancholy did they both look. And I sithed. I hadn’t much more’n got through sithin’, when he rode up, and says he,
“The seventh boy is worse, and the twin girls are took down with it, it would be a melankoly pleasure Miss Allen if you could go up.” I went.
Betsey had got the most of ’em to sleep, and was settin’ between a few cradles, and trundle beds, and high chairs all filled with measles, and a few mumps. Betsey’s teeth was out, and her tow frizzles lay on the table with a lot of paper--so I mistrusted she had been writin’ a poem. But she was now engaged in mendin’ a pair of pantaloons, the 8th pair--she told me--she had mended that day, for Simon Slimpsy was a poor man, and couldn’t afford to buy new ones. They was a hard and mournful lookin’ pair, and says I to her--in a tone in which pity and contempt was blended about half and half--
“I am at rest,” says she, “more at rest than I have been for years.”
“Are you happy?” says I, lookin’ keenly at her.
“I feel real dignified,” says she, “There isn’t no use in a woman trying to be dignified till she is married, for she can’t. I have tried it and I know. I can truly say Josiah Allen’s wife, that I neveh knew what dignity was, until one week ago last Sunday night at half past seven in the evenin’,” says she, turnin’ over the pantaloons, and attactin’ a ghastly hole of about 7 by 9 dimensions in the left knee.
I sot silently in my chair like a statute, while she remarked thus, and as she paused, I says to her agin, fixing my mild but stern grey eyes upon her weary form, bendin’ over the dilapitated folds of the 8th.
“I have got something to lean on,” says she.
I thought of the fragile form bendin’ over the lean and haggard horse, and totterin’ away, withered by age and grief, in the swallow tailed coat, and says I in a pityin’ accent,
Says I, in a kind of a blind way, “You may be sorry if you do,” and then I says to her in clear and piercin’ accents these words,