But, she would not listen unto he.
THE JONESVILLE SINGIN’ QUIRE.
Thomas Jefferson is a good boy. His teacher to the Jonesville Academy told me the other day, says he,
“Thomas J. is full of fun, but I don’t believe he has a single bad habit; and I don’t believe he knows any more about bad things, than Tirzah Ann, and she is a girl of a thousand.”
This made my heart beat with pure and fervent emotions of joy, for I knew it was true, but I tell you I have had to work for it. I was determined from the first, that Thomas Jefferson needn’t think because he was a boy he could do anything that would be considered disgraceful if he was a girl. Now some mothers will worry themselves to death about thier girls, so afraid they will get into bad company and bring disgrace onto ’em. I have said to ’em sometimes,
“Why don’t you worry about your boys?”
“Oh things are winked at in a man that haint in a woman.”
Says I, “There is one woman that no man can get to wink at ’em, and that is Samantha Allen, whose maiden name was Smith.” Says I, “It is enough to make anybody’s blood bile in thier vains to think how different sin is looked upon in a man and woman. I say sin is sin, and you can’t make goodness out of it by parsin’ it in the masculine gender, no more’n you can by parsin’ it in the feminine or neutral.