But little, little did I ever think in my early youth, when I ust to read about Solomon’s Temple and Sheba’s Splendor, and sing about Pleasures and Palaces, that I should ever enter in and partake of ’em.
Why, the house that Martin lived in wuz a sight, a sight—big as the meetin’-housen at Jonesville and Loontown both put together, and ornamented with jest so many cubits of glory one way, and jest so many cubits of grandeur another. Wall, it wuz sunthin’ I never expected to see on earth, and in another sphere I never sot my mind on seein’ carpets that your feet sunk down into as they would in a bed of moss in a cedar swamp, and lofty rooms with stained-glass winders and sech gildin’s and ornaments overhead, and furniture sech as I never see, and statutes a-lookin’ pale with joy, to see the lovely picters that wuz acrost the room from ’em; and more’n twenty servants of different sorts and grades.
Why, actually, Josiah and I seemed as much out of place in that seen of grandeur as two hemlock logs with the bark on ’em at a fashionable church weddin’.
And nothin’ but the pure love I felt for them children, and their pure love for me, made me willin’ to stay there a minute.
Martin wuz good to us, and dretful glad to have us there to all human appearance; but Alice and Adrian loved us.
And I hadn’t been there more’n a few days before I see one reason why Alice had writ me so earnest to come—she wuz in deep trouble, she wuz in love, deep in love with a young lawyer, one who writ for the newspapers, too—
A man who had the courage of his convictions, and had writ several articles about the sufferin’s of the poor and the onjustice of rich men. And amongst the rest he had writ some cuttin’ but jest articles about the massacreein’ of children by them trolley cars, and so had got Martin’s everlastin’ displeasure and hatred.
The young man, I found out, wuz as good as they make anywhere; a noble-lookin’ young feller, too, so I hearn.
Even Martin couldn’t say a word aginst him, for, in the cause of Duty and Alice, I tackled him on the subject. Sez I, “Hain’t he honest and manly and upright?”
And he had to admit that he wuz, that he hadn’t a vice or bad habit, and wuz smart and enterprisin’.