Sez I sternly, “Don’t you go to sayin’ a word aginst John Richard Allen, that angel man.”
“I hain’t said nothin’ aginst that angel man, have I? Dumb him, he’d talk anybody to death.”
“What are you doin’ now, this minute, Josiah Allen?”
“I am a talkin’ sense, hard horse sense, and you know that I have been fifed, and base-drummed, and harrowed, and worried, and eat up, and picked to pieces down to my very bones by relations on both of our two sides, and I have stood it like a man. I hain’t never complained one word.”
I groaned aloud here at this awful story.
“Wall, I hain’t never complained much of any. But when the Nation takes it in hand and wants to draw our relations closter and closter, then I will interfere. For that is their main talk and effect, from what I can make out from this speech,” sez he, a pintin’ to a newspaper.
“I will interfere, Samantha Allen, and you can’t keep me from it. I will stop it if a mortal man can. Anyway, I will boldly wade in and tell ’em my harrowin’ experience, and do all I can to break it up. For as I told you, Samantha Allen, I have had more experience with relations than any other human bein’ on the face of the globe; I have got the intellect and I have got the pans.”
Oh, how I did have to talk to Josiah Allen to try to diswaide him from this rash enterprise!
“Why,” sez I, “this meetin’ hain’t a goin’ on now; you are mistook.”
But he knew he wuz in the right on’t. And anyway, he said he could tell his trials to some of the high officers of that enterprise and influence ’em.