“Good land! good land!”
The letter wuz from John Richard Allen, writ for him by a friend. It seems that he had seen in the village paper that we wuz in the South and where we wuz; and he lay sick and a dyin’, as they said, in a little hamlet not a dozen miles away.
I read the letter, and then went imegiatly—for to think and to act is but a second or third nater to me—and waked up my pardner, who was stretched out on a bamboo couch on the other end of the piazza fast asleep, with the World a layin’ outstretched and abject at his feet. And I then told him the startlin’ truth that his own relation on his own side lay sick unto death less than a dozen miles from us.
Wall, that noble man riz right up as I would have had him rozen to meet the exigencies of the occasion.
He sez, “The minute our children get back we will take the pony and drive over and see him.”
As I said, they had gone to the depot to meet visitors from Delaware—a very distinguished cousin of Maggie’s on her own side, who had writ that he wuz a goin’ to pass through here on his way further South, and he would stop off a day or two with ’em—he and his little boy, if it wuz agreeable to them.
I had hearn a sight about this rich Senator Coleman—Maggie’s father, old Squire Snow, wuz dretful proud of him.
He had made himself mostly—or, that is, had finished himself off.
He went to Delaware as a teacher, and married a Miss Fairfax, a very rich young woman down there, settled down in her home, went into business, got independent rich, wuz sent to Congress and Senate, and had a hand in makin’ all the laws of his State, so I hearn.
He wuz now takin’ a tower through the Southern States with his motherless boy, little Raymond Fairfax Coleman, so he writ (he thought his eyes on him, and jest worshipped the memory of his wife).