“I do not want to rob you of them,” says Betsey tenderly.
“Take ’em,” says he in a wild kind of a way, “take ’em, and give me the money quick, before I am completely unmanned.”
She handed him the money, and says he in agitated tones, “Take care of the ear rings, and heaven bless you.” And he ketched up his things, and started off in a awful hurry. Betsey gazed pensively out of the winder, till he disapeared in the distance, and then she begun to brag about her ear rings, as Miss Shakespeare’s relicks. Thomas Jefferson praised ’em awfully to Betsey’s face, when he came home, but when I was in the buttery cuttin’ cake for supper, he come and leaned over me and whispered—
“Who bought for gold the purest brass?
Mother, who brought this grief to pass?
What is this maiden’s name? Alas!
Betsey Bobbet.”
And when I went down suller for the butter, he come and stood in the outside suller door, and says he,
“How was she fooled, this lovely dame?
How was her reason overcame?