He said, “Yes, so it was.”
He feels well about it, as I say, it is agreeable to us both, and then Josiah’s crops looked well, the crows took a little of his corn, but it had come on, and bid fair to be a first rate crop. And as for his oats and barley and winter wheat, they couldn’t be bettered.
The Editer of the Augur had brought home his bride, a good lookin’ light complected woman, who seemed devoted to him and the two twins. They went to house keepin’ in a bran new house, and it was observed that he bought a cottage bedstead that didn’t have any posts, and life for him seemed blest and peaceful.
Betsey Bobbet did not pine away and expire as might be expected by cursory readers of her last poem in the Jonesville Gimlet. But any deep philosipher who had made the Human Race, his (or her) study for any length of time, never worrys over such efushions, knowin’ that affliction is like the measles, and if they break out freely in pimples and poetry, the patients are doin’ well.
Betsey had been pretty quiet for her through the winter and spring, she hadn’t made overtures only to two more—which was a little pill doctor, and a locul preacher who had been sent round by the Conference. As she remarked to me, “It is so natural to get attached to your minister and your physician.”
As I said the summer sun basked peacefully down and Jonesville almost asleep under her rays, seemed the abode of Repose. But where was there a Eden fenced in, but what Ambition let down the bars, or climbed over the fence. But this was a noble Ambition, a Ambition I was proud to see a gettin’ over the fence. It was a Ambition that leaped over into my door yard the very day I heard the blessed tidings, that Horace Greeley was run up for President.
I had always respected Horace, he had always been dear to me. And when I say dear, I want it to be plainly understood—I insist upon it that it shall be understood—that I mean dear, in a scriptural, and political sense. Never sense I united myself to Josiah Allen, has my heart swerved from that man so much as the breadth of a horse hair. But Horace’s honest pure views of life, has endeared him to every true lover of the Human Race, Josiah Allen’s wife included. Of course we don’t think alike on every subject. No 2 human bein’s ever did. Horace and I differ on some things such as biled vittles, Wimmen’s Rights, and cream biscuit. He don’t believe in biled vittles, and it is my favorite beverage. He is a unbeliever in salaratus, I myself don’t see how he makes cream biscuit fit to eat without it. And he—not havin’ me to influence him—hadn’t come out on to the side of wimmen’s havin’ a Right. But as a general thing, Horace Greeley was to be found onto the side of Right. He was onto the side of the weak, the down trodden. He was always a plottin’ to do some good to somebody, and I felt that if the eyes of his spectacles could be once opened onto this subject of wimmen’s havin’ a Right, that he would be more help to us, than a army of banners. Months before he was run up for President I had felt this, and in the fall of 1871, as Josiah was a settin’ by the fire alone, he a readin’ the World and I a knittin’ says I to him,
“Josiah are you willin’ that I should go down to New York village on a tower, and have a talk with Horace about the Human race and wimmen’s havin’ a right?”
Josiah didn’t seem to be willin’, he looked up from the World, and muttered somethin’ about “Tammany’s ring.”
I don’t know when the old Smith blood so riled up in me as it did then. I remember I riz right up where I set in front of the stove, and waved my right hand, I was so excited, and says I,