Says I, “It is Tirzah Ann’s father.” And I continued goin’ on with my subject. “No medder lark ever had a sweeter voice than our Tirzah Ann. And when she sings about the ‘Sweet fields that stand dressed in livin’ green,’ she sings it in such a way, that you almost feel as if you had waded through the ‘swellin flood,’ and was standin’ in them heavenly medders. Tell me I never heard music! Ask Whitfield Minkley whether Tirzah Ann can sing Anna Lowery or not, on week day evenin’s, and old Mr. Robin Grey. Ask Whitfield Minkley, if you don’t believe me. He is a minister’s only son, and he hadn’t ought to lie.”
The little conceited feller’s face looked as red as a beet. He was a poor lookin’ excuse any way, a uppish, dandyfied lookin’ chap, with his moustache turned up at the corners, and twisted out like a waxed end. He pretended to laugh, but he showed signs of mortification, as plain as I ever see it. And he put up his specs, and I’ll be hanged if he hadn’t broke one eye off’en ’em, and looked at me through it. But I wasn’t dawnted by him, not a bit. I didn’t care how close he looked at me. Josiah Allen’s wife hain’t afraid to be examined through a double barreled telescope.
Just then a good lookin’ man with long sensible whiskers and moustache, hangin’ the way the Lord meant ’em to, and who had come up while I was a speakin’ this last--spoke to me and says he,
“I am like you madam, I like ballads better than I do opera music for the parlor.”
I didn’t really know what he meant, but he looked good and sensible lookin’ and so says I in a blind way,
Says he, “I am very partial to those old songs you have mentioned.”
Before I could say another word, that poor crazy thing begun agin, to yell, and pound and screech, and I says to him,
“Poor thing! couldn’t there be somethin’ done for her? If her mind can’t be restored, can’t she get help for Mr. Vitus’es dance?”
And then he explained it to me, he said she wasn’t crazy, and didn’t have Mr. Vitus’es dance. He said she was a very fashionable young lady and it was a opera she was singin’.
“A operation,” says I sithin’ “I should think as much! I should think it was a operation! It is a operation I don’t want to see or hear agin.” And says I anxiously, “Is it as hard on everybody as it is on her? Does everybody have the operation as hard as she has got it?”