"The boys all had splendid homes in the city, but their houses wuz either too big or too small, or too hot or too cold, to have Almina live with 'em, and she wuz expected to git her livin' out of the apples. They wuz first class grafts, none so good anywhere round, and brought the very highest price, and she would got a good livin' and laid up money, if she had been left alone, if she hadn't been protected and warned.
"But every single one of them brothers would come out from the city and warn her agin the other brothers, and tell her how easy it wuz for a weak innocent woman to be deceived and cheated by designin' men, her nearest relation mebby. And that a gentle female's mind wuzn't strong enough to grapple with depravity, and she must lean on him for protection, and he would see her through, so every single one on 'em told her, and warned her agin the other six brothers.
"And Amanda would feel real affectionate and grateful to each one on 'em in turn, and be glad she had such a strong protector and warner to take care of her. And every single time they come to protect and warn her they would take home a few bushels of them delicious apples, and when they got through protectin' and warnin' her, she didn't have apples enough left to make a mess of sass."
But what of it, what had that got to do with my great work that wuz seethin' through my brain? That shows how triflin' and how ornary a woman's mind is, to bring up that old story whilst my brain wuz workin' to a almost dangerous degree inside of my forward tryin' to prove to the female masses at large the great fact of men's protectin' love and the needecessity for it, to prove to 'em as I laid out to prove to the listenin' world that wimmen wuz naterally inferior to men, their brains smaller and lighter, when weighed up in the stillyards. Their emmanuel strength less, their idees more whifflin' and onstabled, and that therefore and accordin'ly wimmen needed and had got to have man's masterful mind and emmanuel strength to protect her from the evils and wickedness of the world, and specially from the awful tuckerin' and dangerous job of votin'.
At this juncter I paused for a minute to collect my thoughts together and then I brought forth from my brain this convincin' argument.
If wimmen don't need a man to protect her and take care on her, why is she so much more ignorant of sin and depravity? Why is there five times more men in prisons and penitentiaries than there is wimmen, if they knowed as much about crime as men do?
"No," sez I, soarin' up in eloquence, "what a man has been through and been educated up to in business and political life, he knows how to protect tender females from. Why," sez I, fairly carried away on the wings of my own eloquence, "men can teach wimmen more in one day about criminal wickedness, graft, false witnessing, drunkenness, bribery, political corruption of all kinds, than she can learn from her own sect in months. Not but what," sez I reasonably, "she can learn some from some on 'em, but not nigh so much nor nigh so fast."
I didn't know but Samantha would take lumbago from my cuttin' remarks, but she didn't seem to. She took up her pan of peeled potates and prepared to leave the room. But as she went out she said sunthin' agin about that old Debatin' School, and the feller she always tried to git on the other side of the argument, so's to help her out. Showin' as plain as the nose on your face jest how queer wimmen are, how their minds will wander, and how impossible it is to keep 'em down to the subject under discussion.