I wuz most a good mind to advise him to set in the sun bareheaded all he could, thinkin’ mebby it might harden ’em some, but didn’t know how it would be took.
He thought he knew a sight, but the shadder he really cast on worldly affairs wuz exceedingly small, he could step over it the hull time, but he felt that it reached the horizon. 434 Robert talked quite a good deal with him, to pass away the time I spoze, but there wuz a queer smile in his eyes and kinder patient and long sufferin’ as if to say:
“You’ll know more in the future than you do now and I’ll bear with you.”
The young man thought he wuz patronizin’ Robert, I knew from his liniment. He wuz a infidel, and seemed to think it made him very smart. You know some folks do think it is real genteel to doubt and a mark of a deep thinker.
I hearn him go on for quite a spell, for Robert wouldn’t argy with him, thinkin’ I spoze it might strain his arm to hit at vacancy. But at last I seemed to have to speak up to Miss Meechim and say:
“How strange it is that some folks think the less they believe the bigger it makes ’em, but good land! it don’t take much intellect to believe in nothin’, it don’t strain the mind any if it is ever so weak.”
I guess he hearn me, for he kinder changed his talk and went to patronizin’ the seenery. Well, it wuz beautiful a good deal of the way, though at the last of our journey it broke out rainy all of a sudden right whilst Josiah wuz all engaged in admirin’ a particular view, and it grew cold and disagreeable. And he bein’ tired out, worried a sight about the rain and the suddenness on’t and how it stopped his sight-seein’ and brung on his rumatiz, and he complained of his corns and his tight boots, and said that I had ort to seen that he wuz dressed thicker, and fretted and acted. And I sez:
“You’ve got to take things as they come, Josiah. I couldn’t send anybody out this mornin’ to bring in a pail of weather to see if it wuz goin’ to rain. You’ve got to take it as it comes, and when it comes, and make the best on’t.”
But he still acted restless and oneasy, and most cried, he felt so bad. And I went on and dilated on the merits of calmness and serenity and how beautiful traits they wuz and how much to be desired.