“Mebby you are borrowin’ trouble without a cause, Deacon. With life there is hope, Deacon Slimpsey. It is always the darkest before daylight.” But in vain. He only sighed mournfully.
“She’ll get round me yet, Miss Allen—mark my words, and when the time comes you will think of what I told you.” His face was most black with gloomy apprehensions, as he repeated again—“You see if she don’t get round me,” and a tear began to flow; I turned away with instinctive delicacy, and set my pan of onions in the sink, but when I glanced at him again it was still flowing, and I said to him in a tone of two-thirds pity and one comfort. “Chirk up, Deacon Slimpsey, be a man.”
“That is the trouble,” says he, “if I wasnt a man she would give me some peace,” and he wept into his red silk handkerchief (with a yellow border) bitterly.
BORROWING THE MAGAZINE.
Josiah had been to Jonesville, to the post-office and got the last number of my magazine, and I was just lookin’ at the pictures, which are always as pretty a pink, when happenin’ to cast my eyes out of the window, I saw Miss Gowdey and her little boy comin’ up the road.
Now, some children I am attached to, and some I ain’t; and, when I ain’t, I don’t want to touch ’em with a 40-foot pole. Or—I don’t know—sometimes I would like to touch ’em with one. I have seen children that was so sweet-looking and innocent, that it seemed as if they wouldn’t want much fixin’-over to make angels of ’em; but Johnny Gowdey would want an awful sight done to him, to make an angel of him. Thomas Jefferson says he had as leave have a young tornado let loose on the farm as to have him come here a-visitin’—and his mother always brings him.
Wal, as I said, I see ’em comin’ up the road; and, jest as I expected, they came up to the door and knocked. I got up and opened the door, and set ’em some chairs, and sez I: “Lay off your things, won’t you?”
Sez she: “I can’t stop long.” But she sot about half an hour; and, jest before she went, she took up the magazine, the Christmas number it was, that lay on the stand, and sez she: “I should be dreadful glad to borrer this for a day or 2.”
“I hain’t read a word in it,” sez I, “fer I jest got it.”