“What under the sun is the matter with the relation on Maggie’s side?”
And Josiah said, and it pains me to record it:
“He didn’t know, and he didn’t care a dumb.”
He never liked Senator Coleman for a minute.
But as we descended down to breakfast we soon found out and discovered what wuz the matter. Little Raymond (poor little babyish creeter!), a not mistrustin’ its real value, had took a valuable diamond locket and gin it to little Tommy.
It wuz a very valuable locket, with seven great diamonds in it. It wuz one that the Senator’s dead wife had gin him when they wuz first married, and had their two names writ on it, and inside a lock of their two hairs.
It wuz one of the most precious things in the Senator’s hull possessions; and thinkin’ so much of it, he couldn’t make up his mind to leave it to his banker’s with the rest of his jewelry and plate, but he kept it with him, with a little ivory miniature of sweet Kate Fairfax when she first become his girlish bride.
The relation on Maggie’s side did have one or two soft spots in his nater, and one of ’em wuz his adoration of his dead wife, and his clingin’ love for anything that had belonged to her, and the other wuz his love for his child—more because it wuz her child, I do believe, than because it wuz his own.
Them two soft places wuz oasis’es, as you may say, in his nater. All the desert round ’em wuz full of the rocky, sandy soil of ambition, feverish expectations, and aims and plans for political advancement.
Wall, Raymond had took this locket and gin it to Rosy’s baby. His Pa had told him it would be hisen some time, and he thought it wuz hisen now.