“Jerusalem hain't the only village where God's holy temple has been polluted by money-changers and them that sell doves. Many a sweet little dove of a girl is made by her father and mother, and other old money-changers, to walk up to God's holy altar, and swear to a lie. They think her tellin' that lie, makes the infamous bargain more sacred, makes the infamous life they have drove her into more respectable.
“There was One who cleansed from such accursed traffic the old Jewish temples, but He walks no more with humanity. If he did, would he not walk up the broad aisles of our orthodox churches in American cities, and release these doves, and overthrow the plots of these money-changers?
“But let me tell 'em, that though they can't see Him, He is there; and the lash of His righteous wrath will surely descend, not upon their bodies, but upon their guilty souls, teachin' them how much more terrible it is to sell a life, with all its rich dowery of freedom, happiness, purity, immortality.”
Here my breath gin out, for I had used my very deepest principle tone; and it uses up a fearful ammount of wind, and is tuckerin' beyend what any one could imagine of tucker. You have to stop to collect breath.
And he looked at me with that same stiddy, patient, modest look of hisen; and says he, in that low, determined voice,—
“What you say, madam, is very true, and even beautiful and eloquent: but time is valuable to me; and as I said, I stopped here this morning to see if I could sell”—
“I know you did: I heard you with my own ears. If it had come through two or three, or even one, pair of ears besides my own, I couldn't have believed 'em—I never could have believed that any human creeter, male or female, would have dared to stand up before me, and try to sell me a feller! Sell a feller to me! Why, even in my young days, do you s'pose I would ever try to buy a feller?
“No, sir! fellers must come free and spontaneous? or not at all. Never was I the woman to advance one step towards any feller in the way of courtship—havin' no occasion for it, bein' one that had more offers than I knew what to do with, as I often tell my husband, Josiah Allen, now, in our little differences of opinion. 'Time and agin,' as I tell him, 'I might have married, but held back.' And never would I have married, never, had not love gripped holt of my very soul, and drawed me along up to the marriage alter. I loved the feller I married, and he was the only feller in the hull world for me.”