“You ort to know it! I wuz liftin’ it after hens’ eggs, I thought I would see if there wuz any under the barn before I piled the straw on the floor, and if it wuzn’t for you I wouldn’t keep a dum hen on the place! And if I ever git so I can use this hand agin,” sez he a-wavin’ it out kinder ferocious-like, “I’ll brain every dum one of ’em, there never shall a hen step her dum foot on my farm agin after to-day!”
“Well, well, do keep still, Josiah Allen, how can I git this sliver out and you prancin’ round so?”
“Oh, yes, keep right on, jaw me all you want to, keep right on jawin’ and talkin’, and not let me have a minute’s rest. And let me faint away on your hands. Oh, gracious heavens! can’t you stab a little deeper!”
“Why, you wanted me to prick it out, Josiah.”
In other times I should have rebuked him sharply for swearin’, but truly a woman learns after twenty years experience in married life that there is a time for scoldin’ and a time to refrain from scoldin’. I knew that until that sliver wuz out and the pain eased off there would be no more use reasonin’ with Josiah Allen than there would be with a wild hyena, for when pain enters into a man’s system (a ordinary man) it drives reason out of it, and common sense and decency.
After a while I got the sliver out and did it up in Pond’s extract, he groanin’ and jumpin’ and blamin’ me for it every minute. Why, he told me in one of the worst twinges that if it wuzn’t for me there wouldn’t be a hemlock board on the premises, anyway. And there I never had to my recollection said the word “hemlock” to him. But I knew that jest the minute he got cooled off, his sense would return and his affection for me (he had acted all the while jest as if I wuz prickin’ him a-purpose, and talked to that effect, and seemed mad at me as he could be). But I sot demute, and he didn’t like that, his state wuz such. Sez he:
“Set there and not say a word, will you! I should think if a man lay dead at your door you would speak up and say sunthin’, but no, you don’t care enough about it to say a word. Oh, gracious Peter! did any human bein’ ever suffer what I am sufferin’!”
And then he jumped up and stumbled over a stool and most fell and yelled out at me settin’ there peaceful, “Put that stool in my way, will you! I’ll clear this house of every stool to-morrow if I’m alive! the one that made that man-ketcher is a fool!”
And so it went on for most an hour, but Josiah got over it jest as soon as the pain stopped, he acted like a new man. And he asked me of his own accord before night if I didn’t want to buy a new kind of hens, if I thought best he would buy some Shanghais and Ayrshires. Josiah is a clever critter pretty near half the time, and before he slept he offered to buy me a new stool, or two of ’em, covered with rep. Good land! it all come out jest as I knew it would, I had passed through too many cryses jest like it to be skaired. Why, when I married Josiah Allen I took all these resks, I knew how it would be, my father wuz a man, and so wuz my youngest brother and Uncle John, and I had lived in the house with ’em all. I don’t blame Josiah so very much, I don’t spoze he could help actin’.
Now, wimmen can’t help actin’ in some respects, such as this, if company comes through the front gate onexpected, she can’t help smoothin’ back her front hair if every hair lay as smooth as satin, it is nater for her to go through the motions. And she can’t help jumpin’ if she sees a mouse as if she wuz afraid of her life, though it hain’t reasonable to expect that her life is jeapordized and she will be attackted by it. And it is nater for her to kiss a pretty baby and scold a boy voyalently who is stunnin’ a kitten or a bird. Why, some things come jest as nateral as Nater herself, and can’t be helped no more than she can. Josiah hain’t alone in his actin’ and behavin’.