Says Abel, “The worm has turned, Josiah Allen’s wife! Yes, I feel that I have got to look now to more distant relations for comfort. Yes, the worm has been stepped on too heavy.”
He looked cold, cold as a iceickle, almost. And I see that jest the few words I had spoke, jest the slight hints I had gin, hadn’t been took as they should have been took. So I said no more. For ag’in the remark of that little bad boy came up in my mind, and restrained me from sayin’ any more.
Truly, as the young male child observed, “it wuzn’t my funeral.”
We went home almost immejiately afterwards, my heart nearly a-bleedin’ for the little children, poor little creeters, and Abel actin’ cold and distant to the last.
And we hain’t seen ’em sense. But news has come from them, and come straight. Josiah heerd to Jonesville, all about it.
The miller at Loontown wuz down to the Jonesville mill to get the loan of some bags, and Josiah happened to be there to mill that day, and heerd all about it.
Abel had got the monument. And the ornaments on it cost far more than he expected. There wuz a wreath a-runnin’ round it clear from the bottom to the top, and verses a kinder runnin’ up it at the same time. And it cost fearful. Poetry a-runnin’ up, they say, costs far more than it duz on a level.
Anyway, the two thousand dollars that wuz insured on Harrison’s life wuzn’t quite enough to pay for it. But the sale of his law library and the best of the housen stuff paid it. The nine hundred he left went, every mite of it, to pay the funeral expenses, and mournin’ for the family.
And, as bad luck always follers on in a procession, them mortgages of Abel’ses all run out sort o’ together. His creditors sold him out, and when his property was all disposed of it left him over fourteen hundred dollars in debt.
The creditors acted perfectly greedy, so they say,—took everything they could; and one of the meanest ones took that insane bedquilt that I finished. That wuz mean. They say Sally Ann crumpled right down when that wuz took. Some say that they got holt of that tall weed of Abel’ses, and some dispute it; some say that he wore it on the last ride he took in Loontown.