Well, it wuz on a bright September day that Albina Ann come to Jonesville, after Dora had had only three months, mind you, of common-sense treatment and reasonable livin’, and I wish that you could have seen her face as it rested on Dora’s for the first time. You see, she come in dretful pimpin’ and pensive lookin’, for Henry’s wife had had a siege and Albina Ann had nursed her faithfully, and Henry, too, and the twins, and they wuz all a-pullin’ through.
But bad and wore out as Albina Ann felt, she didn’t feel too bad to have that white dotted veil over her made-up face, and her dress tight as tight could be, and sot up on wobblin’ heels half a finger from the ground a-pitchin’ her kinder forwards. I pitied her. And her first words was, “She is alive, hain’t she? Do tell me so! Is she in the spare bedroom? Oh,” sez she, “to come from one bed of sickness to another!” and she sithed and kinder groaned, and started for the chamber stairs.
Sez I, “She has gone out for a ride.”
“For a ride!” sez she in amaze, “then she can’t be in immediate danger,” and then she sez, “Oh, how I have dreaded to come from the almost dying bed of my dear ones in Denver to the sick bed of another.”
“Well,” sez I, “Dora hain’t bed-sick,” and, sez I, “you’ll see her in a minute, for I hearn ’em at the gate.”
Well, when that plump, rosy-cheeked girl, with sparkling, laughing eyes, bounded into the room (her Uncle Josiah had told her that her Ma had come) and threw her arms round her neck and kissed her, you could have knocked Albina Ann over with a pin-feather. I felt conscience-struck, and as if I’d ort to told her. Her face turned ghastly pale under the false color, and she looked at Dora and then at me in a stunted, dumfoundered, helpless way, pitiful in the extreme, that most made me ’fraid that she had lost her faculty. But pretty soon she gradually brightened up into a happy, blissful look, and her nateral color returned, and how she did hug and embrace Dora, and she sez to me in a solemn way, “It is a mericle, Samantha!”
“No,” sez I, “no mericle, only a triumph of common sense and common-sense remedies—pure air, early hours, wholesome food, etc., etc.”
And then she noticed her dress, I see—the absence of cosset, the common-sense shoes. But she never lisped a word aginst it, and hain’t to this day, so fur as I know. The shock had been too great: she had seen the dead raised to life, as it were, and it had shook a little common sense and gumption into her. I ketched her myself the next mornin’ a-lettin’ out her travelin’ dress, and she let her cosset out some. I have some hopes of her.