Well, they did look pretty and I d’no but they could wash 326 the clothes jest as clean after they got used to it, but I shouldn’t encourage Philury to dress up so wash-days.
And it wuz jest so when we see on Lake Como its swarm of pleasure gondolas glidin’ hither and yon with the dark-eyed Italian ladies in bright colored costooms and black lace mantillys thrown over their pretty heads and fastened with coral pins, and the gondoliers in gay attire keepin’ time to the oars with their melogious voices. Josiah whispered to me:
“What a show it would make in Jonesville, Samantha, to see you and me in a gondola on the mill-dam, I with long, pale blue ribbins tied round my best beaver hat and you with Mother Allen’s long, black lace veil that fell onto you, thrown graceful over your head, and both of us singin’ ‘Balermy’ or ‘Coronation.’ How uneek it would be!”
“Yes,” sez I, “it would be uneek, uneeker than will ever come to pass.”
“Well, I d’no,” sez he, “Ury and me could make a crackin’ good gondola out of the old stun boat, kinder hist it up in front and whittle out a head on it and a neck some like an old gander’s. We could take old High Horns for a model, and we could make good oars out of old fish-poles and broom-handles, and you own a veil, and blue streamers don’t cost much––nothin’ henders us from showin’ off in that way but your obstinate sperit.”
But I sez, “I shall never appear in that panoramy, never.”
“Oh, well,” sez he, gayly, “Jonesville has other females beside you, more tractable and more genteel. Most probable Sister Celestine Bobbett and she that wuz Submit Tewksberry would love to float in a gondola by the side of one of Jonesville’s leadin’ men.”
I looked full in his face and sez, “Has foreign travel shook your morals till they begin to tottle? Have I got to see a back-slidden Josiah?”
Sez he, real earnest, “You are the choice of my youth, the joy of my prime of life.”