“Let the relations go to Jericho, Samantha! every one on ’em, and the Potentates! every one on ’em!” and he kicked off them robes quicker than I can tell the tale.
Sez I, “Josiah, you needn’t tear every rag you’ve got on; take ’em off quietly.” He’d put ’em on over his own clothes. He obeyed me implicitly, and sez he anxiously, as he laid ’em all on the bed:
“You’ve gin up the idee, hain’t you, Samantha?”
Sez I, “I have for the present, Josiah, I wuz only doin’ 225 it to emulate your sacrifice; if you don’t sacrifice yourself any further, I shan’t.”
He hadn’t been so good to me for sometime as he wuz for the rest of that day. I only done it to stop his display, and my conscience hain’t been quite at rest ever sence about it, but then a woman has to work headwork to keep her pardner within bounds. I wuzn’t goin’ to have him make a fool of himself before Arvilly and Miss Meechim. Arvilly would never let him hearn the end on’t nor me nuther.
Well, we met the potentate in our own clothes and he met us in his own clothes, jest as he and we had a right to. He wuz a real sensible man, so Robert Strong said, and he understood a good deal of his talk and ort to know.
Well, from Shanghai we sailed for Hongkong and then embarked for Point de Galle on the island of Ceylon, expectin’ to stop on the way at Saigon in Cochin-China and Singapore.
It wuz dretful windy and onpleasant at first. It is much pleasanter to read about a monsoon in Jonesville with your feet on a base burner than to experience one on a steamer. Everything swayed and tipped and swung, that could, even to our stomachs. We only made a short stop at Saigon––a hotter place I wuz never in. I thought of the oven in our kitchen range and felt that if Philury wuz bakin’ bread and meat and beans and got into the oven to turn ’em, she knew a little about the climate we wuz enjoying.
As we ascended the river our ship got a little too near the shore and kinder run its prow into a jungle where the monkeys hung from the tree-tops and made fun of us, I spoze, mad at our invadin’ their domain and wanted us to pay, ’tennyrate the muskeeters sent in their bills, sharp ones. Saigon is a pretty place set in its tropical scenery; it has eighty or ninety thousand inhabitants and belongs to France. The natives are small and slower than time in the primer.
Singapore is an island in the straits of Malacca and is twenty-four milds long and fourteen wide; it is a British 226 province ruled by native princes under the Queen. Here the days and nights are of equal length and it rains about every day; it has a mixed population, Chinamen, Malays, Europeans and a few Americans, mebby a hundred thousand in all.