It hain’t right to worship a human creeter I know; and then agin, sometimes, when I would meditate on the wickedness of my bein’ so completely wrapped up in him, I have tried to exonerate myself by this thought:
The children of Israel wuz commanded not to worship anything that wuz like anything else in heaven or on earth. And I have sometimes felt that I would get clear on that head if I knelt to him every day and burned incense under him, and made a perfect Dagon of him.
For my dear companion is truly onlike anything I ever see or hearn on; his demeaners is different, and his acts and his talk under excitement. And his linement looks fur different from any other folks’es linements.
But I am a digressin’, and to resoom.
We sot there as happy as a nest full of turkle doves, when all of a sudden the girl come up with a card on a little silver server, and handed it to Maggie as if it wuz a cracker or a cup of tea, and Maggie took it and read out:
“Colonel Seybert.”
And Thomas J. spoke up and told the girl to ask the Colonel out there where we wuz; and so she did, and sot him a chair by Thomas J., out amongst the rose-vines.
He come in as polite as ever, and accosted us all in a very genteel way. He had brought Maggie a great bunch of orchids, and said “the Madam had sent them to her with her compliments.”
He meant his wife—he most always called her so.
The posys he brought wuz very rare. They grow on air mostly, and only have the very slightest soil to connect ’em with the earth.