So along a week or so after sugarin’, Josiah beset me one day to go over to Mr. Perry’ses.
Josiah liked Abel; there wuz sunthin’ in his intense enthusiastick nature and extravagant methods that wuz congenial to Josiah.
So I bein’ agreeable to the idee, we set out after dinner, a-layin’ out to be gone two nights and one hull day, and two parts of days, a-goin’ and a-comin’ back.
Wall, we got there onexpected, as they had come onto us. And we found ’em plunged into trouble.
Their only child, a girl, who had married a young lawyer of Loontown, had jest lost her husband with the typus, and they wuz a-makin’ preparations for the funeral when we got there. She and her husband had come home on a visit, and he wuz took down bed-sick there and died.
I told ’em I felt like death to think I had descended down onto ’em at such a time.
But Abel said he wuz jest despatchin’ a messenger for us when we arrove, for, he said, “in a time of trouble, then wuz the time, if ever, that a man wanted his near relations clost to him.”
And he said “we had took a load offen him by appearin’ jest as we did, for there would have been some delay in gettin’ us there, if the messenger had been despatched.”
He said “that mornin’ he had felt so bad that he wanted to die,—it seemed as if there wuzn’t nothin’ left for him to live for; but now he felt that he had sunthin’ to live for, now his relatives wuz gethered round him.”
Josiah shed tears to hear Abel go on. I myself didn’t weep none, but I wuz glad if we could be any comfort to ’em, and told ’em so.