Says Josiah—for he seemed to think it would comfort her—“We’ll come back again Serepta, we’ll come back bime-by.”
The next day early in the forenoon, A. M., we arrove again at Serepta’s dwellin’. She had jest got the last man of the drove started off, but she was tusslin’ with two colporters and an agent for a Bible Society. And two wimmen set by ready to grapple her as soon as the men started off. One of ’em had a sort of a mournful look, and the other was as hard a lookin’ woman as I ever see. She was fearfully humbly, but that haint why I call her hard lookin’. I don’t lay up her humbleness ag’inst her, knowin’ well that our faces haint made to order. But she looked hard, as if her nater was hard as a rock; and her heart, and her disposition, and everything. She had a large wart on her nose, and that also looked hard as a gravel stun, and some like it. She had a few long whiskers growin’ out under her chin, and I couldn’t help wonderin’ how anything in the line of vegetation could grow out of such a grannyt soil.
After lookin’ at her a half minute it didn’t surprise me a mite to hear that her name was Horn, Miss Horn. I see these two wimmen look round the house examinin’ everything as close as if they was goin’ to be swore about it to a justice to save their lives. Serepta hadn’t had time to wash a dish, nor sweep a single sweep, and her childern wasn’t dressed. And I heerd Miss Horn hunch the other one with her large, bony knuckles, and whisper:
“She lays abed shamefully late, sometimes. The smoke rose out of her chimbly this mornin’ at exactly 17 minutes past 6, jest an hour and two minutes earlier than it was yesterday mornin’, and half an hour and twenty seconds earlier than it was the mornin’ before that.”
“Gettin’ up and burnin’ out the wood the meetin’ house furnishes for ’em, and not a dish washed. It is a shame,” says the other woman.
MISS HORN.
“A shame!” says Miss Horn. “It is a burnin’ shame, for a minister’s wife, that ort to be a pattern to the meetin’ house. And she can’t find time to go a visitin’ and talk about her neighbors’ affairs. When anybody don’t feel like visitin’, and talkin’ about their neighbors’ doin’s, it is a sign there is sunthin’ wrong about ’em. There haint a thing done in the neighborhood but what I am knowin’ to; not a quarrel for the last twenty years but what I have had my hand in it. I am ready to go a visitin’ every day of my life, and see what is goin’ on. I haint too haughty and proud spirited to go into back doors without knockin’ and see what folks are a doin’ in their kitchens, and what they are a talkin’ about when they think nobody is round. And it shows a haughty, proud spirit, when anybody haint willin’ to go round and see what they can see in folks’es housen, and talk it over with the other neighbors.”
Says the mournful woman, “I heard Bill Danks’es wife say the other day, that she thought it looked queer to her, her visitin’ the poor members of the church jest as often as she did the rich ones. She thought—Bill’s wife did—that it looked shiftless in her.”
“She is shiftless,” says Miss Horn.