And I sez in my heart—“Good-bye, dear old Land! you no need to be in sech a hurry to go back and dissapear in the distance; no truer lover did you ever have than she who now witnesses your swift departure,” and even in my reverie wantin’ to be exact, I added—“she whose name wuz once Smith.”
Quite a while did I stand there until Reason and also Josiah told me that I had better seek my state-room.
I don’t find no fault with that room, it probble wuzn’t its fault that the narrer walls riz up so many times, and seemed to hit me in my head and stomach, specially the stomach, and then anon turn round with me, and teeter, and bow down, and hump up, and act.
No; the little room wuzn’t to blame, and my sufferin’s with Josiah Allen for the three days when he lay, as he said, in a dyin’ state, right over my head—
I a-sufferin’ twice over—once in myself and agin in my other and more fraxious and worrisome self.
The wild demeanors, the groans, the frenzied exclamations, and anon the faint and die-away actions of that man can’t never be described upon, and if it could, it would make readin’ that no man would want to read, nor no woman neither.
But after a long interval, in which, while I wuz a-layin’, a-tryin’ in a agonized way to think how I wanted my effects distributed amongst the survivors—I would be called away from that contemplation to receive my pardner’s last wills and testaments, and I heard anon or oftener, spoke in solemn axents—
“Bury me in the dressin’-gown, Samantha.”
He clung to that idee, even in his lowest and most sinkin’est moments.
I reached up, or tried to, and took holt of his limp hand that dangled down over my head, and I sez—