I paused, spotted in the face from conflictin’ emotions, and Betsey begun in a haughty triumphant tone,
“Woman’s speah—”
Which words and tone combined with recollections of the aged sufferer in the blue swallow tailed coat, so worked on my indignation, that I walked out of the house without listenin’ to another word, and put on my bunnet out in the door yard.
But I hollered back to her from the bars—for Josiah Allen’s wife haint one to desert duty in any crisis—“that the four youngest boys ought to be sweat, and take some saffern tea, and I should give the five girls, and the twins, some catnip, and I’d let the rest of ’em be, till the docter come.”
I haint seen Betsey since, for she is havin’ a hard time of it. She has to work like a dog. For Simon Slimpsey bein’ so poor, and not bein’ no calculator, it makes it hard for ’em to get along. And the old man seems to have lost what little energy he had, since he was married, Betsey is so hard on him. He has the horrors awfully. Betsey takes in work, but they have a hard time to get along. Miss Gowdey says that Betsey told her that she didn’t mind workin’ so hard, but she did hate to give up writin’ poetry, but she didn’t get no time for it. So as is generally the case, a great good to the world has come out of her sufferin’.
I guess she haint wrote but one piece sense she was married and they was wrote I suppose the day I ketched her with her teeth out, for they come out in the next week’s Gimlet, for just as quick as the Editor of the Auger was married, Betsey changed her politix and wrote agin as formally for the Gimlet.
The following are some of the verses she wrote:
I AM MARRIED NOW.