THE HINDOO MOTHER.
THE HINDOO MOTHER.
Says I, “You needn’t never say that agin to me, thinkin’ I will believe it, for before Mormonism was ever made, human nature was made, wimmen’s hearts was made. And when you show me a man who would enjoy havin’ his right hand cut off, or his eyes plucked out of his head, then I will show you a woman, a womanly woman, who enjoys sharin’ the love of the man she worships—enjoys seein’ it passin’ away from her, given to another. Why, it is aginst nater, as much as it is for the sun to shine at midnight. Blackness and despair and gloom is what rains when the sun of love is gone down—it’s nater, and can’t be helped, no more than the sun can, or the moon, or anything. No woman ever enjoyed this wretched doctrine—that is, no good woman, no pure, tender-hearted, affectionate woman.”
“Why,” says he, “I s’posed you thought all wimmen was perfect.”
“No, I don’t, sir, no sir. A woman can lose all that is sweet and lovely in her nature—all the traits that make her so attractive, her tenderness, her affection, her constancy, her modesty, her purity. She can get very low down in the scale of being, lower, I think, than a man can get. You know the further up any one is, the worse it hurts ’em to fall.
“Now the angels that fell down from heaven, I s’pose it changed ’em, and disfigured ’em, and spilte ’em as bad agin as it would to fall down suller. Josiah fell a week ago last Wednesday night, with a hammer in one hand, and a box of nails in the other. He was fixin’ up a cupboard for me in the sullerway. He fell flat down and lay his hull length on the suller bottom. Skairt me awfully. Skairt him, too, and sort o’ madded him, as it always will a man when they fall. I was gettin’ the supper onto the table, and I started on the run for the suller door, and says I, in agitated axents, and weak as a cat with my emotions:
“Did it hurt you, Josiah?”
Says he, sort o’ surly, “It didn’t do me any good.”
But he got up, and was all right the next day. I have used this poetical simely, of its hurtin’ anybody worse to fall down from such a lofty height than to fall down the sullerway, to show my meanin’ that a pure woman’s nature is naturally very pure and lofty, and if she loses it she falls very low indeed.