It made it all right with Uncle Martin, but his wife, Aunt Debby, she sed, “Why can he see bishops and elders so plain?”
“Wall,” sez Uncle Mart, “it is a curous complaint.” And she sez—
“’Tain’t curous a mite; it’s as nateral as ingratitude, and as old as Pharo.”
And she and Uncle Mart had some words about it.
Wall, his eyesight seemed to grow worse and worse so fur as old friends and relations wuz concerned, till all of a sudden—it wuz after my third book had shook the world, or I spoze it did; it kinder jarred it anyway, I guess—wall, what should that man, P. Martyn, do, but write to me and invite me to the big city where he lived.
Sez he, “Relations ort to cling closter to each other;” sez he, “Come and stay a week.”
I answered his note, cool but friendly.
And then he writ agin, and asked me to come and stay a month. Agin my answer wuz Christian, but about as cool as well water.
And then he writ agin and asked me to come and stay a year with ’em. And he would be glad, he said, he and his two motherless children, if I would come and live with ’em always.
This allusion to the motherless melted me down some, and my reply wuz, I spoze, about the temperture of milk jest from the cow.