But the neighbors received the news that we wuz goin’ to a waterin’ place coldly, or with ill-concealed envy.
Uncle Jonas Bently told us he shouldn’t think we would want to go round to waterin’ troughs at our age.
And I told him it wuzn’t a waterin’ trough, and if it wuz, I thought our age wuz jest as good a one as any, to go to it.
He had the impression that Saratoga wuz a immense waterin’ trough where the country all drove themselves summers to be watered. He is deef as a Hemlock post, and I yelled up at him jest as loud as I dast for fear of breakin’ open my own chest, that the water got into us, instid of our gettin’ into the water, but I didn’t make him understand, for I hearn afterwards of his sayin’ that, as nigh as he could make out we all got into the waterin’ trough and wuz watered.
The school teacher, a young man, with long, small lims, and some pimpley on the face, but well meanin’, he sez to me: “Saratoga is a beautiful spah.”
And I sez warmly, “It aint no such thing, it is a village, for I have seen a peddler who went right through it, and watered his horses there, and he sez it is a waterin’ place, and a village.”
“Yes,” sez he, “it is a beautiful village, a modest retiren city, and at the same time it is the most noted spah on this continent.”
I wouldn’t contend with him for it wuz on the stoop of the meetin’ house, and I believe in bein’ reverent. But I knew it wuzn’t no “spah,”—that had a dreadful flat sound to me. And any way I knew I should face its realities soon and know all about it. Lots of wimen said that for anybody who lived right on the side of a canal, and had two good, cisterns on the place, and a well, they didn’t see why I should feel in a sufferin’ condition for any more water; and if I did, why didn’t I ketch rain water?
Such wuz some of the deep arguments they brung up aginst my embarkin’ on this enterprise, they talked about it sights and sights;—why, it lasted the neighbors for a stiddy conversation, till along about the middle of the winter. Then the Minister’s wife bought a new alpacky dress—unbeknown to the church till it wuz made up—and that kind o’ drawed their minds off o’ me for a spell.