“I shall be wretched as a widower, Samantha; do patronize ’em, I had ruther save on sunthin’ else than this.”
So to please him I gin ’em a little more than he did, and they guaranteed me one hundred and forty years, and then Josiah worried agin and wanted me to promise not to marry agin after he wuz gone. He worships me. And I told him that if I lived to be a hundred and forty I guessed I shouldn’t be thinkin’ much about marryin’, and he looked easier in his mind.
One day we met a weddin’ procession, most a mild long, I should say. The bride wuz ahead in her sedan chair, her dress wuz richly embroidered and spangled, a veil fringed with little pearls hung over her face. Pagodas with tinkling gilt bells, sedan chairs full of silk and cloth and goods of all kinds wuz carried in the procession by coolies. Idols covered with jade and gilt jewelry, a company of little children beatin’ tom-toms and gongs, and the stuffed bodies of animals all ornamented with gilt and red paper riggers wuz carried, 182 and at the tail end of the procession come the friends of the family.
The bridegroom wuzn’t there, he wuz waitin’ to hum in his own or his father’s house for the bride he’d never seen. But if the bride’s feet wuz not too large he would most likely be suited.
Miss Meechim said, “Poor young man! to have to take a wife he has never seen; how widely different and how immeasurably better are such things carried on in America.”
Sez Arvilly, “What bridegroom ever did see his bride as she really wuz? Till the hard experience of married life brought out her hidden traits, good and bad? Or what wife ever see her husband’s real temper and character until after years of experience?”
Sez I, “That’s so; leaves are turned over in Josiah Allen’s mind now as long as we’ve been pardners that has readin’ on ’em as strange to me as if they wuz writ in Chinese or Japan.”
But then it must be admitted that not to see your wife’s face and know whether she’s cross-eyed or snub-nosed is tryin’. But they say it is accordin’ to the decree of Feng Shui, and therefore they accept it willingly. They have a great variety of good fruit in Canton––some that I never see before––but their vegetables don’t taste so good as ours, more stringy and watery, and their eggs they want buried six months before usin’ ’em. I believe that sickened me of China as much as anything. But then some folks at home want their game kep’ till it hain’t fit to eat in my opinion. But eggs! they should be like Cæsar’s wife, above suspicion––the idee of eatin’ ’em with their shells all blue and spotted with age––the idee!