“A change!” says I, in low, tremblin’ tones of emotion. “Eve wanted a change in Paradise, and she got it, too.”
“But,” says Tirzah Ann, for my tone impressed her fearfully, “don’t you believe in a change for the summer? Don’t you think they are healthy?”
I thought I wouldn’t go into the heights and depths of felosophy in which I had flew and doven—she had heard me time and agin, and eloquence is very tuckerin’ especially after you have been doin’ a hard day’s work—so I merely said:
“When anybody is bakin’ up alive in crowded cities; when the hot sun is shinin’ back on him from brick walls and stony roads; when all the air that comes to them comes hot and suffocatin’, like a simon blowin’ over a desert; to such, a change of body is sweet, and is truly healthy. But,” says I, lookin’ round again on the cool and entrancin’ beauty and freshness of the land and other scape, “to you whom Providence has placed in a Eden of beauty and bloom, to you I again repeat for the 3d time that line of eloquent and beautiful poetry,—‘Better let well enough alone.’”
I could see by the looks of her face that I hadn’t convinced her. But at that very minute Josiah came back, and hollered to me that “he guessed we had better be goin’ back, for he was afraid the hens would get out, and get into the turnips.”
He had jest set out a new bed, and the hens was bewitched to eat the tops off. He had shut ’em up, but felt it was resky to not watch ’em. So we started off. But not before I had told Whitfield my mind about the plan. He looked more convinced than Tirzah Ann did, a good deal more. But I no need to have builded up any hopes on that, onto his mean, for I might have known that when a man loves a woman devotedly, and they haint been married—wall, anywheres from 1 to 4 or 5 years, her influence over him is powerful, and never can be told. She moulds him to her will as easy as clay is moulded in the hands of Mr. Potter. Sometimes she moulds honer into him, and then again dishoner; sometimes she moulds him comfortable, and then again she moulds him hard, and powerful oncomfortable. These things are curious, but useful and entertainin’ to study on, and very deep.
TIRZAH ANN TO A WATERIN’ PLACE.
Wall, if you’ll believe it, after all my eloquent talk, and reasonin’, and everything, the very next week they set off on their journey after a change, on that exertion after rest and pleasure. They come to see us the day before they went, but their plans was all laid, and tickets bought, (they was goin’ to the same place and the same hotel and tavern Skidmore’s folks was), so I didn’t say nothin more—what was the use? Thinkses I, bought wit is the best if you don’t pay too much for it; they’ll find out for themselves whether I was in the right on’t or not.
But bad as I thought it was goin’ to be, little did I think it was goin’ to be so bad as it wuz. Little did I think that Tirzah Ann would be brought home on a bed. But she was. And Whitfield walked with two canes, and had his right arm in a sling. But as I told Josiah, when anybody chased up pleasure so uncommon tight, it wasn’t no wonder they got lamed by it. For pleasure is one of the curiousest things in the world to ketch,—speakin’ in a coltish and parable way. Almost impossible to ketch by chasin’ her. And if anybody don’t believe me, let ’em get up some mornin’ before sunrise, and take a halter, and start off a purpose, and see if they can overtake her;—see if they can ketch her, and put a bit and martingill onto her. See if they don’t find she is skittish and balky, and shies off when they go to put the bits in her mouth. And see, when they think they have got the upper hands of her, whether she don’t throw ’em head over heels, and caper off agin in front of ’em.