We are goin’ to buy ’em a neat little cream-colored house, with green blinds, right on the age of the village. We have got our eyes on it now, Josiah and me have; and to speak more plain, and let out a secret—which mustn’t go no further—we have got a contract of it. The man can’t give a clear deed till 1st of September.
This house and the one next to it—which is jest exactly like it—are kinder set off by themselves, and are the handsomest, pleasantest places in Jonesville, and everybody says so. I told Josiah he couldn’t do better than to buy one of ’em, and he sees it now; he feels well.
In the back garden is fruit trees of all kinds, and berry vines, and bushes, and a well of soft water; two acres of land, “be it more or less: to wit, namely, and so 4th, a runnin’ up to a stake, and back again, to wit.”
Josiah read it all off to me; he is a great case to read deeds and insurance papers, and so 4th. He thinks they are dretful agreeable readin’.
I know when we was first married, and he wanted to use me so awful well,—bein jest married, he naturally wanted to make himself agreeable and interestin’ to me—and so to happyfy me and keep me from bein’ homesick, and endear himself still more to me, he would draw out his tin trunk from under the bed, and read over deeds and mortgages to me by the hour. But I didn’t encourage him in it, and kinder broke it up; but he loves to read ’em to this day; and I felt so neat over this contract, that I let him read the hull thing right through, and was glad to hear it, though it took him one hour by the clock. He reads slow, and then there was so many whereases, and namelys, and to wits, that he would git baulked every few minutes. He would git to wanderin’ round in ’em—git perfectly lost—and I’d have to lay holt and help him out.
We are goin’ to git a deed of the house, unbeknown to Whitfield and Tirzah Ann, and make ’em a present of it. They was married the 14th day of September, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon—jest the time Josiah was born—so I told Josiah that I would bake up as nice vittles as I could, and enough of ’em,—enough to last a week or ten days—and we would have supper all ready in the new house, jest the day of the month and the time of the day he was born and they was married, and invite ’em over; and we’d have Thomas Jefferson and Maggie Snow, and the Widder Doodle, and turn it into a sort of 4th of July,—keep the day in a kind of a camp-meetin’, holiday style.
I believe in workin’ and earnin’ your honest bread, etc. and so 4th; but still, I believe in makin’ things agreeable and pleasant, very. We Americans, as a nation, are a dretful anxious-lookin’, hard-workin’, long-faced, ambitious, go-ahead race, and we tackle a holiday as if it was a hard day’s work we had got to git through with jest as quick as we could; and we face enjoyments with considerable the same countenance we do funerals. But I am layin’ out now to take a good deal of comfort the 14th of next September, Providence permittin’.
I think a sight of Tirzah Ann. I’ve done well by her, and she sees it now; she thinks a sight of old mother, I can tell you. She enjoys middlin’ poor health, now-a-days, and her pa and I feel anxious about her, and we talk about her a good deal nights, after we git to bed; and I wake up and think of her considerable, and worry.
And truly, if anybody is goin’ to set up in the worry business, nights is the best time for it in the hull twenty-four hours; middlin’-sized troubles swell out so in the dark; tribulations that haint by daylight much bigger’n a pipes-tail, at midnight will look bigger’n a barn. I declare for’t, I’ve had bunnets before now, that didn’t suit me,—was trimmed up too gay, or come over my face too much, or sunthin’, and when I’d wake up in the night and think on ’em, they’d look as big to me as a bushel basket, and humblier; and I’d lay and sweat to think of ever wearin’ ’em to meetin’; but at daylight, they would kinder dwindle down again to their natural shape. And so with other sufferin’s that come tougher to me to bear. When I was a bringin’ up Thomas Jefferson, tryin’ to git him headed right, how many times he has stood before me at midnight a black-leg—his legs as black as a coal, both of ’em;—a pirate; a burglar; he has burgled his pa and me, night after night; set Jonesville afire; burnt New York village to ashes; and has swung himself on the gallows.
And Tirzah Ann has had cancers; and childern; and consumptions; and has been eloped with; and drownded in the canal, night after night; but good land! in the mornin’ the childern was all right. The sunshine would shine into my heart like the promises in the Bible to them that try to bring up their childern in the fear of the Lord; and I could lay holt of them promises and feel first rate.