“If you wuz Anna’s true friend and mine, if you acted as a blood cousin ort to, you would talk to Anna and try to make her listen to reason.”
“No, I thank you, Tamer Ann; there is sunthin’ now in her heart that is beyend reason, as fur above and beyend it as the stars are above the earth.”
“If you did your duty, Josiah Allen’s wife, you would tell her to obey her mother and marry the man her mother approves of, that her mother’s superior wisdom and experience teaches her is the best fitted to insure her child’s happiness.”
“No, Tamer Ann Smith, I make no matches nor break none, and if I wuz goin’ to advise Anna, which I hain’t, I shouldn’t be liable to advise her to give up all the beauty and romance and happiness of life for the sake of settin’ down under the shade of a family tree and let it shade me alongside that walkin’ mummy, Von Crank.”
“One of the oldest and most aristocratick families in the State. You ought to take it as a great honor that he felt willin’ to connect himself with the Smith family at all.”
I see we couldn’t agree, and I sez, “Tamer Ann, you will agitate yourself so your baslar mangetis will be worse—man-get-us,” sez I thoughtfully; “if that wuz only a contagious disease I know lots of single wimmen who would love to have it prevail.” But my friendly joke didn’t turn her mind round as I meant it should; no, she went on bitterly:
“To think Tom Willis should think of marryin’ Anna, and his father only a common carpenter.”
“Well, Tamer Ann,” sez I, “we kneel every day of our life and worship One who wuz called that.
“Tom Willis,” sez I, “has got the wealth and distinction in himself instead of havin’ to put on a pair of magnifyin’ specks and try to trace it back to some remote ancestor, who mebby had a spark or two of it. You’ll find it right here in him, and I think it is better to have the nobility where you can put your hand on it in a handsome young form than to be chasin’ back for it up a family tree, climbin’ up mouldy old branches, follerin’ rotten, decayin’ old limbs, and some sound ones,” sez I, reasonable; “but, anyway, nobility a century or so old seems sort o’ shadowy and spectral, and don’t impress me so much as it duz while it is right before me, strugglin’ on through disappointments and pain, tryin’ to reach the high prizes of success and Anna—or, I mean, happiness.”
She tossted her head real kinder disdainful, but I went on, for I begun to feel eloquent: “It is so difficult to know a hero when you see him right before your face and eyes. It is easy now, after everything is passed, to open your encyclopedia and read the names of Columbus, and Washington, and Newton, and Luther, etc. But the time wuz when Columbus walked the streets unknown, all the fire of genius, the passion of the discoverer must have looked out of his sad eyes onto the onsympathetic faces of the crowd; it wuz all hidden in his soul. His ears heard the swash of new seas breakin’ on onknown shores, his eyes saw the tall mountains of a grander continent risin’ through the mists, but them around couldn’t see it, they wuz down there in the mists and stayed there. The discoverer of a new world walked homeless and friendless through the streets. He couldn’t carry them cold, blind eyes into the glorious possibilities of the future. No, the poor blind eyes looked scornful at him and laughed at his hopes. The great philosophers and inventors who apprehended what they couldn’t comprehend; who looked through the summer skies cleft by the fall of an apple and saw great systems of philosophy; who saw by the steam of a tea kettle a whole world bound together by swift-rollin’ wheels of lightnin’ speed; who saw through the child’s kite the continents talkin’ together—their rapt eyes saw all these glorious possibilities and wuz derided for it and called idiots by them who looked down on ’em and told ’em it wuz folly, idiocy of the deepest degree to see anything in the fallin’ apple beyond the possibility of a pie. This is the same kind of worldly common sense that makes us onmindful every day of our life of the presence of real heroes in our midst who, manly, honest, and God-fearin’, are tryin’ to vanquish the ills of life and conquer success.”