CHAPTER VIII.
HOW true it is that though you may move the body round from place to place, you can’t move round or move away from the emotions of the soul that are firm and stabled.
You can change your climate, you can repair your dwellin’ house, you can fill your teeth and color your hair, but you can’t make a ardent, enthusiastic man into a sedate and stiddy one, or chain down a ambitious one and make him forget his goles.
Now, Josiah Allen had been happy as a king ever sence he had come South to our son’s beautiful home.
He had seemed to enjoy the change of scene, the balmy climate, and the freedom from care and labor.
But that very freedom from toil, that very onbroken repose wuz what give him and me a sore trial, as you can see by the incident I will tell and recapitulate to you.
You see, Josiah Allen, not havin’ any of his usual work to do, and not bein’ any hand to sew on fine sewin’, or knit tattin’, or embroider tidies and splashers, etc., he read a sight—read from mornin’ till night almost.
And with his ardent, enthusiastic nater he got led off “by many windy doctrines,” as the text reads.
He would be rampant as rampant could be on first one thing and then another—on the tariff, the silver bill, and silo’s, and air ships, etc., etc.