And he snapped me up enough to take my head off, and said that he “couldn’t always be calm and wuzn’t goin’ to try to be.”
“No,” sez I reasonable, “you’ve got to be megum in that, or in eatin’ bread and milk; of course, you could kill yourself on that, though it seems innocent and harmless; you can carry everything too fur.”
And seein’ that his liniment still bore the marks of restless oneasiness and onhappiness, I eppisoded a little on his side of the question, for what will not a woman do to ease a pardner’s mind and comfort him?
“Yes, Josiah, Cousin Joel Smith’s life used to be so serene and so deadly calm on all occasions that she used to mad Uncle Joel, who wuz of a lively and active temperament, like the most of the Smiths.
“I asked Joel once on a visit there, when she had been so collected together and monotonous in aspect, and talked with such oneven and sweetness of tone that I got dead tired on’t myself, and felt that I had been lookin’ on a sunbaked prairie for months, and would have been glad enough to had her got up a change of liniment some way, and a change of axent higher or lower, I sez to Cousin Joel.
“Do you spoze Serintha Jane would git excited and look any different and talk any faster or louder if the house should get afire?”
And he said no, the house did git afire once, when he wuz away. And she discovered it in the morning whilst she wuz makin’ some scollops in her hair (she always had her hair scolloped just as even as ever a baby’s petticoat wuz), keepin’ that too calm and fixed through bangs and braids. She had scolloped it on one side and wur just beginnin’ it on the other when she see the fire, and she went gently to the door, opened it in a quiet ladylike way, and asked a neighbor goin’ by in her low even axent, if he would kindly stop a minute. And the neighbor stopped and she said sweetly:
“Could I trouble you to do a little errand for me if you are going down town, or would it incommode you?”
He said he would do it.