He intimated that he should most probable have cider on the table in bottles when he got home. “You know,” sez he, “that there is a hull box of old medicine bottles to the barn.”
But I told him that nothin’ stronger than root beer, made by my own hands out of pignut and sassparilla, should ever be sot on my table. But I may see trouble with him in that way. Whilst we wuz talkin’ about it, I brung up to illustrate the principles I wuz promulgatin’, the ivory tankard Arvilly pinted out to us in the American exhibit.
It wuz a big ivory tankard holdin’ enough liquor to intoxicate quite a few. Two big, nasty, wreathin’ snakes (signifyin’ the contents on’t in my mind) dominated one side and made the handle, and held the laurel wreath surroundin’ it (signifyin’ office-holders, so I spozed), in its big hungry mouth. On top of the hull thing stood a rarin’ angry brute, illustratin’ the cap-stun and completed mission of the whiskey bottle.
Arvilly talked more’n half an hour to Miss Meechim about it, and I wuz glad on’t.
But when I brung that up, Josiah waved the subject off with a shrug of his shoulders in the true French way, though a little too voyalent.
I had ketched him practicin’ that movement of the shoulders before the glass. He had got so he could do it first rate, I had to own to myself, though I hated to see him practise it so much, mistrustin’ that it wuz liable to bring on his rumatiz.
And I see in a letter he writ home: “Be sure, Ury, and weed the jardin, specially the onions,” and he ended the letler: “Oh revwar, mon ammy.”
I knowed that it would make Ury crazy as a hen, and Philury, too, wonderin’ what it meant, but couldn’t break it up. But speakin’ of “jardins,” we went to several on ’em, the last one we see the most beautiful seemin’ly of the lot. Jardin de Luxemburg Palais Royal, Tuilleries, Acclimation, Jardin des Plantes. There are hundreds of ’em scattered through the city, beautiful with flowers and shrubbery and statutes and fountains and kept in most beautiful order and bloom at public expense.
And we visited cathedrals, missions, churches, museums, the sewers, libraries, went through the galleries of the Louvre––milds and milds of beauty and art, as impossible to describe as to count the leaves in Josiah’s sugar-bush or the slate stuns in the Jonesville creek, and as numerous as if every one of them leaves and slate stuns wuz turned into a glorious picter or statute or wondrous work of ancient or modern art. I hain’t a-goin’ to try to describe ’em or let Josiah try, though he wouldn’t want to, for he whispered to me there in a sort of a fierce whisper: “Samantha Allen, I never want to set my eyes agin on another virgin, if I live to be as old as Methulesar or a saint.” Well, there wuz sights on ’em, but they looked real fat and healthy, the most on ’em; I guess they enjoyed good health.