“I think you’ve got a regular downright good ’un, Betsey,” said her brother, looking at her admiringly.
“Well, Bill, do you know if I was to go there much, Mrs Thorne would make me a regular spitfire. She gives me the hot creeps with her condescending, high-and-mighty ways. She’s come down in the world. Well, suppose she has. So’s thousands more, but they don’t—they don’t—”
“Howl,” said Mr William Forth Burge, “that’s it; they don’t howl. Lor a mussy me, what difference do it make? Do you know, Betsey, I believe I was just as happy when I first started business on my own account; and I’m sure I thought a deal more of my first new cart, with brass boxes and patent axles, painted chocklit—it was picked out with yallar—than I did of our new carriage, here, and pair. Ah! and my first mare, as I only give fifteen pun for, could get over the ground better than either of these for which I give two hundred because they was such a match.”
“There, now, you’re beginning to grumble again, Bill, and I won’t have it. You’ve grown to be a rich man, all out of your own cleverness, and you ought to be very proud of of it; and if you’re not, I am.”
“But, you see, Betsey, I ain’t so happy as I thought I should be.”
“Then you ought to be, seeing how happy you can make other folks; and oh, Bill, by-the-way, them Potts’s are in trouble.”
“Well, that ain’t nothing new. Potts always is in trouble. He ought to have been christened Beer Potts or Pewter Potts, though they don’t know what a pewter pot is down in this part of the world.”
“That’s better, Bill; now you’re beginning to joke,” said little Miss Burge, smiling, “But you’ll do something for the Potts’s?”
“I’ll never do nothing for anybody else again in the place,” said Mr William Forth Burge; “a set of ungrateful beggars. What’s the matter with Potts? Been tipsy again?”
“I’m afraid he has, Bill; but that isn’t it. They’ve got the fever there; that big, saucy girl, Feelier, is down with it and the poor mother wants money badly.”