"You git out of this! Clear yourself, quicker! I ain't goin' to have you diseasin' honest folks, ef you have got the smallpox."
"I dells you I'fe got der small pox. Ton't you versteh? der SMALL POX!" This time he shouted it out in capital letters!
"Clear out! I'll call the men-folks ef you don't clear;" and at once she shouted, in a tip-top voice, "Ike, you Ike, where air you?"
Ike made his appearance on the full run.
"W-w-what's the matter, mother?"—Miss Scudder his mother! I should have been shocked, as I was on my first visit to New Jersey, if I had not had a key to this. "That is a very pretty girl," I said on that occasion to a Jersey-man; "who is she?"—"She's old Miss Perrine's da'ter," was the reply. I looked at the innocent victim of man's criminal conduct with commiseration. "What a pity!" I remarked.
"Not such a very great pity," said Jersey, eying me very severely. "I reckon old man Perrine's got as big a cedar-swamp as you, or I either, would like to own."
"Her grandfather you speak of?"
"No, I don't: I'm talking 'bout her father,—he that married Abe Simm's da'ter and got a power of land by it; and that gal, their da'ter, one of these days will step right into them swamps."
"Oh," I replied, "Mrs. Perrine's daughter," accenting the "Missis!"
"Mussus or Miss, it's all the same in Jersey," he answered.