“Yes,” sez he, “as a babe. I have planned it all out; I could slip over to the store, this summer store they have got here to accommodate the boarders, and buy twenty yards or so of sheetin’, you could use it afterwards for sheets, you know, and you could pin it onto me and tie it round the waist with a pale-blue sash. I could buy a couple of yards of blue cambric and you could tear it into, and tie it round my waist with a big bow, and there I would be a babe.”
“What would you do with your whiskers?” sez I coldly. “And your wrinkles and your gray bald head?”
“By Jimminy!” sez he, “I forgot them.”
He see himself, as quick as his attention wuz drawed to it, that a babe in long white dresses ortn’t to have gray whiskers and a bald head.
“Well,” sez he, “what do you say to a Pirate or a Bandit chief? I could buy a piece of red and yeller creeton, figgered, and a piece of striped for a sash. They’re always depictered in dime novels as bein’ very dressy with feathers, and I could kinder jam in the top of my hat and put some feathers in it, I could buy a couple of turkey wings of Nate Enders, he deals in turkeys, and I have to go most to his house to go to the store—what do you say, Samantha? Or, would you go as a Shepherd Boy, or how would you go?”
I wuz wore out, and I sez, “I would go as a natteral fool, Josiah, and you wouldn’t have to buy anything or change a mite to do it.”
“Yes, there it is; keep right on, I never knew it to fail in my life; I never yet got a chance to enter fashionable life and show off a little but you tried to break it up.” Sez he still more pitiful, “I always wanted to look fancy, Samantha, and you’ve never seemed willin’. I don’t say that you are jealous of my looks, for I don’t think you are any such a woman, but I will say it looks queer, but now there is a chance for me to look gay, and I am goin’ to embrace it.”
Jest that minute the girl with the cap on come into the room agin, and I nudged him to keep still, but he wouldn’t. I enticed him over to the winder and argued with him there. My voice wuz real low, but he wuz so excited and spoke so loud the girl must have got a inklin’ of what he wuz sayin’, and, seein’ the dilemma I wuz in, she spoke right up and sez with her queer little axent: