(Enter Samantha, carrying a pair of swifts with some skeins of yarn on it)
Bet. Josiah Allen’s wife, shall your cruel boy be allowed to injure a cause, and bleed a tendeh heart?
Sam. Thomas Jefferson what have you been up to now?
Ed. He has done nobly; but I must go at once. Hired girls must be seen to immediately.
Thos. J. And I must go and fodder the steers.
Exit Editor and Thos. J.
(One of the twins runs up to the swifts and begins to tangle the yarn on it, and while Samantha attends to that, the other one tips over a basket of apples. Samantha holds the child off with one hand while she picks up the apples with the other.)
Bet. If there is any object on earth, Josiah Allen’s wife, that I warm to, it is the sweet little children of widowers. I have always felt that I wanted to comfort them, and their deah pa’s. I have always felt that it was women’s highest speah, her only mission, to soothe, to cling, to smile, to coo. I always felt that it was women’s greatest privilege, her crowning blessing to soothe lacerations, to be a sort of a poultice to the manly breast when it is torn with the cares of life. Do you not think so?
Sam. Am I a poultice, Betsey Bobbett? Do I look like one? Am I in a condition to be one? I have done a big ironing to-day, churned ten pounds of butter, scalded two hens and picked ’em, made seven pies and a batch of nut-cakes, two pans of cookies, and mopped all over. And now I have got these twins on my hands, all this carpet yarn to double, blank verses, ahead on me, and dinner to get, and now I am called on to be a poultice. What has my sect done that they have got to be lacerator-soothers and poultices, when they have got everything else under the sun to do. Everybody says that men are stronger than wimmen, and why should they be treated like glass-china, liable to break to pieces every minute? And if they have got to be soothed, why can’t they git some man to soothe ’em? They have as much agin time as wimmen have. Evenin’s they don’t have anything else to do, they might jest as well be a soothin’ each other as to be a hangin’ round grocery stores, or settin’ by the fire whittlin’.
Bet. Oh! it must be so sweet, so strangely sweet, to soothe the manly breast: to soothe, to smile, to coo.