“Under water?” sez I; “milk under water?”
I see he wuz gittin’ sick of the idee—sick as a dog, but he sez—
“Yes, milk ’em under the water in rubber bags, jest as Ezekiel did, and Malachi, and all the rest on ’em.”
“Wall,” sez I, “you’ll keep bachelder’s hall then, and cook your own vittles and make your own butter for all of me. I hain’t a-goin’ into any sech enterprise.”
“Wall,” sez he, “that don’t surprise me at all; I never yet got up a uneek idee but what you backened it all you could.”
Wall, we hung round here for some time, and I meditated on how the prisoners must have felt, condemned to
“Fetters and the damp vault’s dayless gloom.”
And as I see how they had wore the very stuns away, a-pacin’ back and forth in their narrer bounds like caged lions, I felt like sayin’ with Byron:
“May none these marks efface,
For they appeal from tyranny to God.”