And oh! how I sithed (to myself) as I thought it over. Emily hadn’t had the fearful lesson that I had had. Her pardner’s morals never had wobbled round and tottered under the pressure of this pernicious doctrine, and a Widder Bump. My sithes was fearful, as I thought it over, but they was inward and silent ones. For my devotion to my pardner is such that I would not give even the testimony of a sithe against my Josiah.
When necessary, and occasion demands it, I scold Josiah myself, powerful; I have to. But I will protect him from all other blame and peril, as long as I have a breath left in my lung, or a strength left in my armpit.
But oh! what feelin’s I felt, what deep, though silent, sithes I sithed, as I thought it over to myself. How the posy will not give out its perfume; will hang right onto it with its little, dainty, invisible hands till it is trod on; then it gives it up—has to. And gold won’t drop a mite of its dross; obstinate, haughty, holdin’ right onto it till it is throwed into the fire, and heat put to it.
And to foller up the simelys, Josiah Allen’s wife’s heart had to be tried in the fiery furnace of pain and mortifacture before it would give up and do its duty.
Oh! how my conscience smoted me as I thought it over. Thought how the hand of personal sufferin’ had to fairly whip me into the right. There had hundreds and thousands of my own sect been for year after year a sufferin’ and a agonizin’. Bearin’ the heaviest of crosses with bleedin’ hands, and eyes so blinded with tears they could hardly ketch a glimpse of the sweet heavens of promise above ’em. And how at last, bein’ fairly drove to it in their despair, they writ to Emily and me for help: help to escape out of the deeps of personal and moral degradation; help to rescue them and the whole land from barberism and ruin. And there we hadn’t paid no more attention to that letter than if it hadn’t been wrote to us.
Oh! how guilty I felt. I felt as if I was more to blame than Emily was, for her house was bigger than mine, and she had more to do. And she hadn’t had the warnin’ I had. I was the guilty one. In the spring of the year, and on a Friday night, right up on the ceilin’ of our kitchen had those fearful words been writ, jest as they was in Bellshazzer’ses time:
“Mean! mean! tea-kettle!” and et cetery. Which bein’ interpreted in various ways, held awful meanin’s in every one of ’em. “Mean! mean!” showin’ there was mean doin’s a goin’ on; “tea-kettle!” showin’ there was bilin’ water a heatin’ to scald and torture me. And takin’ it all together this awful meanin’ could be read: “Josiah Allen is weighed in the ballances, and is found wantin’.”
I hadn’t heeded those fiery words of warnin’. I had covered my eyes, and turned away from interpretations (as it were). Forebodin’s had foreboded, and I hadn’t minded their ’bodin’s. Forerunners had run right in front of me, and I wouldn’t look at these forerunners, or see ’em run.
Blind trust and affection for a Josiah had blinded the eyes of a Samantha; but now, when the truth was brought to light by a Miss Bobbet, when I could see the awful danger that had hung over me on a Friday night and in the spring of the year, when I could almost hear the whizzin’ of the fatal arrow aimed at my heart, my very life—now I could realize how them hearts felt where the arrows struck, where they was a quiverin’ and a smartin’ and a ranklin’.
Now, it felt a feelin’, my heart did, that it was willin’, while a throb of life remained in it, to give that throb to them fellow-sufferers (fellow-female-sufferers). And when Miss Bobbet said, jest as she started for home, that Elder Judas Wart wanted to have a talk with me on religion and mormonism, I said, in a loud, eloquent voice: