“Yes,” sez I, “and after dinner we could set down, and set there as long as we wanted to.”
“I wouldn’t stir in over three days!” sez he, “not an inch from my good old rockin’-chair.
“But,” sez he, with a deep sithe, “them days wuz too happy to last.”
“No,” sez I, “Providence permittin’, we will see agin the cliffs of Jonesville; and home never seemed so sweet as it will when troubles and toil and foreign travel is all past, and our two barks are moored once more in our own peaceful door-yard.”
“Never to be onmoored!” sez he, with a almost fierce mean. And my own longin’ heart and achin’ back and tired-out eyeballs gin a deep assent to his remarks.
Sweet, sweet is the fruits of foreign travel, but lofty and precipitus are the thorny branches it hangs on, and wearin’ in the extreme is the job of pickin’ ’em offen foreign fields and bringin’ ’em home in our mind basket.
And happy are they who carry ’em back fresh and hull and sound—some folks carry ’em home in a sort of a jell or a jam—dretful mixed up and promiscus like.
CHAPTER XV.
OLD YORK AND ITS CATHEDRAL.
Wall, as we got back to Edinburgh it was on the first edge of the evenin’, and I had the chance of hearin’ a real Scotch ministrel; not one of them bagpipes of theirn, which sounds perfectly awful to me, but which Josiah wuz dretful took with (of which more anon), but this man had a violin, or fiddle, and sung in a sweet, high voice some of the best ballads of the country.