GOVERNED BY PRINCIPLES.
On the next Monday mornin’, I let loose to my feelin’s as it was, and begun to make open preparations. I baked up the best vittles the house afforded, for I determined Josiah should live like a king durin’ his temporary widowerhood. Then after I got through bakin’ and got the house clean as a pin, I commenced to fix a dress to wear on the journey, for of course I wasn’t goin’ to wear my best dress with a overskirt on the railway. I am a master hand for bein’ careful of my clothes, and I knew it would almost spile one of my best dresses, but I had a calico dress as good as new. It was a dark blue ground work with a handsome sprig on it, and after I took up two tacks in it, I felt that it was jest the thing to wear on the tower.
I had jest put it on, and had got the lookin’ glass onto the floor to see if it cleared the floor enough, when Thomas Jefferson come in, and says he,
“Your dress is too short, mother, I hate to see short dresses, they look so hihorsical.”
I answered him with dignity as I looked over my shoulder into the glass,
“Samantha Allen, whose maiden name was Smith, haint a goin’ to mop out the cars for the railroad company, free gratis for nothin’,” and I added with still more impressive dignity, as I hung up the lookin’ glass, “what you mean by hihorsical I don’t know.”
He said it was a compound word derived from the Greek, “high,” to intoxicate, and “horsical,” a race horse, which two words strained off from the dead language and biled doun into English meant “hihorsical.”
I told him “I didn’t care for his Greek, I didn’t care if it was dead, not a mite, I shouldn’t cry over it,” and I told him further, fixin’ my gray eyes upon him serenely, “that there was two or three words that wasn’t dead, that he would do well to strain off, and bile doun, and take ’em for a stiddy drink.”