“I am fur from thinkin’,” sez I, “that it wuz a proper thing to do. But I must say if the town wuz as innocent as Jack, it would be a good thing for the town, and the town wouldn’t have talked as much about it.”
It wuz a real hot day, and as we sot there talkin’ time had slipped round and the sun with it, till it beat right into our settin’-room winder, and we all presperation and sweat, and Tamer got up and looked in the glass and sez, “Oh, my! how I do look!” And she took out a little pearl-mounted box from her pocket with some rice powder in it and a little mite of a puff brush and went to applyin’ it to her heated and red visage as she went on with her remarks.
“It wuz that very summer, they wuz paintin’ the roof of the Presbyterian Church a bright red, and Jack and Eddie went over there while the men had gone home to their dinner, and they painted each other a bright red all over, their hair and faces and hands and legs all a bright solid red, and on their clothes they put the paint in stripes. No human objects outside of a menagerie ever looked as they did as they marched home through the streets. I would love to hear you say, Samantha, that you ever see Hamen or me cuttin’ up such tricks.”
“Not exactly,” sez I, lookin’ pensively at her paint box, “but I don’t spoze the little creeters knew how dretfully they would look or how oncomfortable and sticky they would make themselves or their parents.”
“Well, I know Jack got a good whippin’ for that scrape after we had scoured him off with turpentine so we could whip him.”
“Well,” sez I, sithin’ deep, “there is lots of things that we have to learn by experience, Tamer Ann, lots of experiments we try with our hearts, our lives, our feller creeters’ happiness and our own. We dip the brush in carelessly that is to leave its mark on us for life, that no turpentine can wash out, recklessly, onheedingly, blindly, we make the fatal marks, blot out the hull of happiness mebby, with the wretched fatality of ignorance. And we git whipped for it,” sez I, “whipped by the achin’ pain in our hearts, by the more stingin’ pain of seein’ some one we love suffer, that we have laid the fatal brush on with our own hands. We are all blind creeters; we are all poor, ignorant children sot down in a new world and another mysterious one in front of us, and it duz become us, Tamer and Tirzah Ann, to try and be patient with these other poor little blunderers, whose mistakes are not so big as ourn, because the consequences are not so mighty. Poor little creeters! It would seem that in pity for our own mistakes we would deal charitable with ’em.”
Jest as I wuz sayin’ these words two children who wuz boardin’ to one of my neighbor’s and goin’ to school, come to git some dime novels that Tamer had promised to bring to ’em. They lived only a little ways from Tamer’s when they wuz to home, and she had supplied ’em with their mental nutriment for some years. They had an armful they had read and got another armful to carry back, for Tamer wuz one to keep her promise, and she had told ’em she would bring some every time she came here visitin’. And they took ’em with deep delight, and couldn’t hardly wait till they got out of the house before they commenced to devour ’em. They wuz as blood-curdlin’ and soul-harrowin’ as any I ever see, and I felt as if I should sink to see youthful mind hunger fed on such pizen stuff. They wuz about fourteen and fifteen years of age, and the girl wuz as pretty as a pink, but beginnin’ to put on airs and act like a heroine. The boy looked ruther rough, some like Cicero, and I knew he wuz tryin’ to give himself that hauty, overbearin’, reckless air that the heroes all had in these novels.
After they had gone with their books I argued with Tamer Ann about lendin’ such trash to children, but she said it would do ’em good—it would give ’em a taste for readin’.
But my last words to her before I left the room and went out to hang on the tea kettle wuz:
“Time will tell.”