The mineral water, they say, tasted awfully. And Tirzah Ann bein’ very dainty always about what she eat and drunk, it went against her stomach so she couldn’t hardly get a tumbler-full of it down. But Miss Skidmore, bein’ so tough, could drink 8 tumblers-full right down, and it seems it lifted her up dretfully. They said she acted haughty and overbearin’ because Tirzah Ann couldn’t drink so much as she could, into a quart or two. She put on airs about it. And Tirzah Ann couldn’t stand that, so one day, (it was the day before they come home,) she drinked 5 tumblers-full right down. And I s’pose a sicker critter never lived than she was.
“IT TASTED AWFULLY.”
I s’pose they was awful skairt about her, and she was skairt about herself. She thought she was a dyin’, and made Whitfield promise on a Testament to carry her back to Jonesville the next day, dead or alive. And he, bein’ a master hand to keep his promise, was as good as his word, and brought her home the next day on a bed.
She got up in a day or two so as to be about the house. But they have been laid up for repairs, as you may say, ever since. They are sick critters now, both on ’em. I have seen awful and deplorable effects from rest and recreation before, but never, never did I see awfuller or deplorabler than they are both a sufferin’ from. They both say that one week’s rest more would have been their death blows, and finished ’em for this world, and I believe it.
A SAD SCENE.
And besides the outward sufferin’s that are plain to be seen, there are inward hurts that are fur, fur worse. Outside bruises and hurts can be reached with arneky and wormwood, but who can put a mustard poultice on a bruised spirit, and a weakened moral? Nobody can’t do it.
Now what I am a goin’ to say, what I am a goin’ to tell now, I wouldn’t have get round for the world—it must be kept! If I didn’t feel it to be my boundin’ duty to write the truth, and the hull truth, and if it wuzn’t for its bein’ a solemn warnin’ to them who may have felt a hankerin’ to go off on a tower after rest; if it wuzn’t for this I couldn’t write the awful words. But I wouldn’t have it told for anything; I wouldn’t have it get round for the world. It must be kept. But sense I am on the subject I will tell it jest as it is. But it must not go no further. Tirzah Ann didn’t tell it right out to me, but I gathered it from little things I heard her and Whitfield say, and from what I heard from others that was there. I mistrust, and pretty much know, that Tirzah Ann flirted. Flirted with a man!
