Now my floor wuz clean and looked like yeller glass, almost, it wuz so shinin’ and spotless, and I resented the idee of her sayin’ that she collected dust off from it. But I didn’t say nothin’ back. She had the bag of poetry on her arm, and I didn’t feel like addin’ any more to her troubles.
But Ardelia, after her mother had swept out ahead, turned round and held out her hand, and smiled a sweet but ruther of a despondent and sorrowful smile, and I kissed her warmly. I like Ardelia. And what I said, I said for her good, and she knew it. I like Ardelia.
Well, Miss Tutt and Ardelia went from our house to Eben Pixley’s. They are distant relatives of hern, and live about 3 quarters of a mile from us. The Pixleys think everything of Ardelia but they can’t bear her mother. There has been difficulties in the family.
But Ardelia stayed there mor’n two weeks right along. She haint very happy to home I believe. And before she went back home it wuz arranged that she should teach the winter’s school and board to Miss Pixley’s. But Miss Pixley wuz took sick with the tyfus before she had been there two weeks—and, for all the world, if the deestrict didn’t want us to board her. Josiah hadn’t much to do, so he could carry her back and forth in stormy weather, and it wuz her wish to come. And it wuz Josiah’s wish too, for the pay wuz good, and the work light—for him. And so I consented after a parlay.
But I didn’t regret it. She is a good little creeter and no more like her mother than a feather bed is like a darnin’ needle. I like Ardelia: so does Josiah.
Chapter III.
THE CHERITY OF THE JONESVILLIANS.
We have been havin’ a pound party here in Jonesville. There wuz a lot of children left without any father or mother, nobody only an old grandma to take care of ’em, and she wuz half bent with the rheumatiz, and had a swelled neck, and lumbago and fits.
They lived in an old tumble-down house jest outside of Jonesville. The father wuz, I couldn’t deny, a shiftless sort of a chap, good-natured, always ready to obleege a neighbor, but he hadn’nt no faculty. And I don’t know, come to think of it, as anybody is any more to blame if they are born without a faculty, than if they are born with only one eye. Faculty is one of the things that you can’t buy.
He loved to hunt. That is, he loved to hunt some kinds of things. He never loved to hunt stiddy, hard work, and foller on the trail of it till he evertook success and captured it. No, he druther hunt after catamounts and painters, in woods where catamounts haint mounted, and painters haint painted sence he wuz born.