“Now what’s the use of your talking so? You know you’re not willing to do anything of the kind. You’re all bound up in your sorrows. You won’t think of the matter again when I’m gone—you know you won’t. If you cared for their bringing up, you’d have that boy at school, instead of letting him fatten on other folks’s property, and bring that girl up to work, instead of lettin’ her go galloping all over creation on other folks’s horses. I tell you, Delia Sleeper, you don’t know how to bring up young ones!”
The captain, in his warmth, braced himself against the door sills so energetically that they cracked, and a catastrophe, something like that which occurred when Samson played with the pillars of the temple, seemed imminent.
“P’raps she’d better turn ’em over to you, Cap’n Thompson,” growled Aunt Hulda; “you’re such a grand hand at bringin’ up!”
“Hulda Prime, you jest attend to your own affairs. This is none of your business; so shet up!” shouted the more plain than polite captain.
“Shut up!” retorted Aunt Hulda. “Wal, I never! Ain’t you gettin’ a leetle obstroperlous, cap’n? This here’s a free country, and nobody’s to hinder anybody’s freein’ their mind to anybody, even if they are a little up in the world. Shut up, indeed!” And Aunt Hulda, in her indignation, rose from her chair, walked round it, and plumped down again in her old position.
“I don’t want any of your interference, Hulda Prime.”
“I know you don’t. But it’s enough to make a horse laugh to see you comin’ here tellin’ about bringin’ up young uns! Brought up your Harry well—didn’t yer?”
“Hush, Aunt Hulda; don’t bring up that matter now,” said Mrs. Sleeper.
“Why not?” said Aunt Hulda, whose neuralgia was working her temper up to a high pitch. “When folks come to other folks’s houses to tell ’em how to train up their children, it’s high time they looked to home.”