Says I: “They hain’t hardly done. I was goin’ to stitch that red stripe on the left leg on again. They hain’t finished as they ort to be, and I would not wear ’em. It looks vain in you.”
Says he: “I will wear ’em, Samantha. I will be dressed up for once.”
I didn’t contend with him. Thinks I: we are makin’ fools of ourselves by goin’ at all, and if he wants to make a little bigger fool of himself, by wearin’ them blue pantaloons, I won’t stand in his light. And then I had got some machine oil onto ’em, so I felt that I had got to wash ’em, anyway, before Thomas J. took ’em to wear. So he put ’em on.
I had good vittles, and a sight of ’em. The basket wouldn’t hold ’em all, so Josiah had to put a bottle of red ross-berry jell into the pocket of his dress-coat, and lots of other little things, such as spoons and knives and forks, in his pantaloons and breast-pockets. He looked like Captain Kidd, armed up to the teeth, and I told him so. But good land! he would have carried a knife in his mouth if I had asked him to, he felt so neat about goin’, and boasted so on what a splendid exertion it was goin’ to be.
We got to the lake about eight o’clock, for the old mare went slow. We was about the first ones there, but they kep’ a comin’, and before ten o’clock we all got there.
The young folks made up their minds they would stay and eat their dinner in a grove on the mainland. But the majority of the old folks thought it was best to go and set our tables where we laid out to in the first place. Josiah seemed to be the most rampant of any of the company about goin’. He said he shouldn’t eat a mouthful if he didn’t eat it on that island. He said, what was the use of goin’ to a pleasure exertion at all if you didn’t try to take all the pleasure you could. So about twenty old fools of us sot sail for the island.
FACING TROUBLE.
I had made up my mind from the first on’t to face trouble, so it didn’t put me out so much when Deacon Dobbins, in gettin’ into the boat, stepped onto my new lawn dress, and tore a hole in it as big as my two hands, and ripped it half offen the waist. But Josiah havin’ felt so animated and tickled about the exertion, it worked him up awfully when, jest after we had got well out onto the lake, the wind took his hat off and blew it away out onto the lake. He had made up his mind to look so pretty that day that it worked him up awfully. And then the sun beat down onto him; and if he had had any hair onto his head it would have seemed more shady.
