“I can tell you, Mom, if that plan is made I shall make it. There hain’t an architect in the country that could begin with me in drawin’ up this plan.” Oh how I sithed and groaned when I see his sotness, and knowed he wuz no more fit for the job than our old steer to give music lessons on the banjo.
He went to the village that afternoon and obtained two long blank books (oh that they 195 could have stayed blank) and three quires of fool’s cap paper (well named) and a bottle of red ink and one of blue ink, besides black, and a dozen pencils of different colors, and after these elaborate preparations he begun drawin’ up his plans.
He would roll up his sleeves, moisten his hands, and go to work early in the mornin’, and set and pour over ’em all day, every stormy day, and every night he sot up so late goin’ over ’em that he most underminded his health, to say nothin’ of the waste of my temper and kerseen. And then he would call in uncle Nate Peedick and they would bend their two gray bald heads together and talk about “specifications” and “elevations” and “ground plans” and “suller plans” till my head seemed to turn and my brain seemed most as soft as theirn.
“And then he would call in Uncle Nate Peedick and they would bend their two gray bald heads and talk about specifications and elevations till my brain seemed most as soft as theirn.” (See page 195)
And sometimes Serenus Gowdey would be called in to aid in their deliberations, though their talk always led off onto Coney Island and rested there, he didn’t git no other idees out of him. Josiah never called on a woman for advice and counsel, not once, though a woman stood nigh him who wuz eminently qualified to pass a first class judgment on the plan. But no, it wuz males only who gin him their deepest thoughts and counsels. Once in awhile I would ask how many stories he wuz layin’ out to have it, and how big it wuz goin’ to be, and every time I asked him he said:
“Wimmen’s minds wuz too weak to comprehend his views. It took a man’s mind to tackle such a subject and throw it.”