I have spoke in a parable way, and would not wish to be understood a thinkin’ pleasure is a horse. Far from it. But this is a very deep subject, and would be apt to carry any one beyond their depth if not simplified and brought down to human comprehension.
“A PITIFUL SIGHT.”
The first time I went to see ’em after they got back, Tirzah Ann told me all about it. She could set up some then. But if it wasn’t a pitiful sight to see them three—Whitfield, Tirzah Ann, and the babe. To see how their means looked now, and then to look back and think how they had looked the last time I had seen ’em in that very place. Why, as I looked at ’em, and see how feeble, and mauger, and used up they all looked, there wasn’t hardly a dry eye in my head. Tirzah Ann told me it was a lesson that would last her through her hull life. Why, she said right out plain, that if she should live to be 3 or 400 years old, she shouldn’t never forget it, and I don’t believe myself that she would.
There they was, she and Whitfield, poor as 2 snails. I never see either of ’em in half so poor order before. They hadn’t no ambition nor strength to work. Their morals had all got run down. Their best clothes was all wore out. And that babe! I could have cried, and wept, to see how that pretty little thing was lookin’. Poor as a feeble young snail, and pale as a little white cotton piller-case. Her appetite was all gone, too. She had always been used to sweet, fresh milk—the milk from her own heifer, white as snow, with a brindle back, that her grandpa give her for the name of Samantha. It gives dretful sweet, rich milk. And the babe almost lived on it. And all the milk they could get for her there was sale milk, sour half the time, and at the best full of adultery, so Whitfield said. And I don’t think anything that happened to them on their hull tower made Josiah and me so mad as that did. To think of that sweet little babe’s sufferin’ from adulted and sour milk. It made us so awful indignant that we can’t hardly speak peacible now, a talkin’ about it.
And then they was all cooped up together in a little mite of a room, and she was used to bein’ out-doors half the time, and had a great, cool, airy room to sleep in nights; and bein’ shet up so much, in such close, bad air, it all wore on her, and almost used her up. Oh! how pale she was, and mauger, and cross! Oh! how fearfully cross! She would almost take our heads off, Josiah’s and mine, (as it were,) every time we would speak to her. It was dretful affectin’ to me to see her so snappish; it reminded me so of her grandpa in his most fractious hours, and I told him it did. Josiah felt bad to see her so; it cut him down jest as bad as it did me.
And then to see Whitfield’s and Tirzah Ann’s demeaniers and means! Why jest as sure as I live and breathe they didn’t seem no more like their old means and demeaniers than if they belonged to perfect strangers, and I told Tirzah Ann so.
And she bust right out a-cryin’, and says she, “Mother, one week’s more rest would have tuckered me completely out. I could not have stood it, I should have died off.”
I wiped my own eyes, I was so affected, and says I, in choked-up axents, “You know I told you how it would be, I told you that you was happy enough to home, and you hadn’t better go off in search of pleasure.”
Says she, bustin’ right out agin, “One week more of pleasure and recreation would have been my death-blow.”