No answer can you get, no matter how hard you may holler, or how out of breath you may get a tryin’ to run round and find out.
You have got to jest set down and let it go on. And all the time you know the threads are a runnin’ without stoppin’, and a bein’ wound up by Somebody—Somebody who is able to hold all the innumerable threads and not get ’em mixed up any, and knows the meanin’ of every one of ’em, till bimeby the thread breaks, and the swifts stop.
But I am a eppisodin’. Wall, as I said, time rolled along till they had been down South most two months, and Thomas Jefferson wrote me that Maggie seemed a good deal better, and he wuz encouraged by the change in her.
When all of a sudden on a cold December evenin’ we got a letter from Maggie. Thomas Jefferson wuz took down sick, and the little girl.
And there wuz Maggie, that little delicate thing, there alone amongst strangers in a strange land.
And sez she, “Mother, what shall I do?”
That wuz about all she said in the way of complaint or agony. She wuzn’t one to pile up words, our daughter Maggie wuzn’t. But that wuz enough.
“Mother, what shall I do? what can I do?”
I illustrated the text, as artists say, while I wuz a readin’. I see her pale and patient face a bendin’ over the cradle of the infant, and little Snow, and over my boy, my Thomas Jefferson, who laid on my heart in his childhood till his image wuz engraved there for all time, and for eternity too, I think.