"I always heard tell, city folks wa'n't much of any in the housekeeping line, and I suspicion it's true. They're too busy gallivanting the streets to look after their houses. For myself, I don't mind telling _you_, I don't set much store by city folks."
"We get a good mess of 'em up here, summers. Rich and poor, and if we 'natives,' as they call us, ain't glad to see them go away every fall, I wouldn't say so. _I don't like 'em!_"
"Well, the rich ones are stuck up, and the poor ones are low down. You never saw such nuisances as those Fresh Air children! Several of our ladies take them in, every summer, for a spell, but _I_ wouldn't have one of them in _my_ house, tracking mud and dirt in on my clean floors--not for anything I can think of. Mrs. Fred Trenholm, who lives down at Milby's Corners, she took in three last season. You should have seen them at church. Ungodly don't express it! Didn't know the creed even. Couldn't sit still through divine worship, on the Sabbath, like Christians."
"Likely that's because most of'm's Jews," Martha observed calmly. "But that's as far as the difference goes. Their lungs needs just as much good air to breathe as little Christians' lungs. An' their stummicks call for the same sorta nourishment. My childern can say off the creed, an' their colic, fine, but I wouldn't wanta have my life depend on bein' able to tell the dirt on their shoes from the dirt on the little Sheenies'. Nor I wouldn't want to die for the number o' times mine wriggle less than they do. Childern is childern, the world over, an' this idea of your bein' nearer heaven when you was a child, like Cora's piece says, is rot--I beg your pardon!--nonsense! There's where lots o' folks slip up on childern. They go on the idea that young 'uns are angels to begin with, an' they break their hearts to see 'em runnin' down, as they grow up. The truth is, it's just the other way 'round. Childern is little animals at the start. You got to housebreak'm, an' train'm, till they learn the tricks o' decent people, an' it's only little by little they get sense to _know_. Every time I lick my young 'uns, I feel kinda mean. They're doin' _almost_ as good as they know how, like the rest of us. Only o' course it can't be helped. You got to lick'm some, to make'm understand. Their constitutions seem to demand it. I try to bring mine up the way, it looks to me, as if the Lord was tryin' to bring up us. Lick'm thora, when necessary, an' then, bear no malice. As I make it out, that's His way, an' I don't see how to improve on it much. But I interrupted you. You was talkin' about how you don't like city folks, an' you'd got as far as the childern."