I set right down on a stun, and held my head for a spell, for it did seem as if it would split open. After a while I staggered up onto my feet, and finally I got so I could walk straight, and sense things a little. Then I began to take the things out of my dinner-basket. The butter had all melted, so we had to dip it out with a spoon. And a lot of water had swashed over the side of the boat, so my pies, and tarts, and delicate cake, and cookies, looked awful mixed up. But no worse than the rest of the companies did. But we did the best we could, and begun to make preparations to eat, for the man that owned the boat said he knew it would rain before night, by the way the sun scalded. There wasn’t a man or a woman there but what the perspiration jest poured down their faces. We was a haggard and melancholy lookin’ set. There was a piece of woods a little ways off, but it was up quite a rise of ground, and there wasn’t one of us but what had the rheumatiz, more or less. We made up a fire on the sand, though it seemed as if it was hot enough to steep the tea and coffee as it was.
After we got the fire started, I histed a umbrell, and sat down under it, and fanned myself hard, for I was afraid of a sunstroke.
Wall, I guess I had set there ten minutes or more, when all of a sudden I thought, where is Josiah! I hadn’t seen him since we had got there. I riz right up and asked the company, almost wildly, “if they had seen my companion Josiah?” They said “No, they hadn’t.” But Celestine Wilkins’ little girl, who had come with her grandpa and grandma Gowdey, spoke up, and says she, “I seen him a goin’ off toward the woods; he acted dreadfully strange, too, he seemed to be a-walkin’ off side-ways.”
“Had the sufferins’ we had undergone made him delirious?” says I to myself, and then I started off on the run toward the woods, and old Miss Bobbet, and Miss Gowdey, and Sister Minkley, and Deacon Dobbins’ wife, all rushed after me. Oh, the agony of them 2 or 3 minutes, my mind so distracted with forebodins, and the perspiration a pourin’ down. But all of a sudden on the edge of the woods we found him. Miss Gowdey weighed 100 pounds less than me. He sat backed up against a tree, in a awful cramped position, with his left leg under him. He looked dretful uncomfortable, but when Miss Gowdey hollered out “Oh, here you be; we have been skairt about you. What is the matter?” he smiled a dretful sick smile, and says he, “Oh, I thought I would come out here, and meditate a spell. It was always a real treat to me to meditate.”
Jest then I came up a pantin’ for breath, and as the women all turned to face Josiah he scowled at me, and shook his fist at them 4 wimmen, and made the most mysterious motions with his hands toward ’em. But the minute they turned round he smiled in a sickish way, and pretended to go to whistlin’.
Says I, “What is the matter, Josiah Allen? What are you here for?”
“I am a meditatin’, Samantha.”
Says I, “Do you come down, and jine the company this minute, Josiah Allen. You was in a awful taken’ to come with ’em, and what will they think to see you act so?”
The wemmin happened to be lookin’ the other way for a minute, and he looked at me as if he would take my head off, and made the strangest motions toward ’em, but the minute they looked at him, he would pretend to smile that deathly smile.