“Dear friends and brothers, that was just a piece of pursyflage.  I know women better than any man I ever met that I felt knew less.  I’ve seen wimmen so foolish I wouldn’t believe anything more foolish could exist, if it hadn’t a-been I’d seen still more foolish wimmen with these same eyes.  But a woman who’d marry Pete was beyond my expectations.  It took a lady with a turble brain-power and a deliberate intention to arrive at that state of mind; so when Pete says to me, ‘That’s just what I be goin’ to do, Zeke,’ he had me swallowing my breath.

“I gathered my fadin’ strength and gained perticlers.

“Seems there was a lady ’bout thirty or forty years older than she oncet had been, who did plain washin’ for the Royal Soverign Prince boys.  The R. S. P. mine was run rather irregular.  The boys took the clean-ups for wages, and the owner took the proceeds from stock he sold as dividends.  I may mention there was less in clean-ups than there was in stock, so the future Mrs. P. Douglass was buckin’ fate in the shape of a brace game.  They was an awful nice set of boys, the Royal Soverign Princes, but when you divide thirty dollars and fifty cents amongst fifteen men for a month’s wages, the washer-lady can’t expect city prices.

“Pete had gained a holt on this lady’s affections by falling into the flume and allowin’ himself to be piped over the waste-gate.  She took care of him for three weeks, at the end of which time Pete arose, renewed, refreshed, and more full of determined uselessness than ever.  Any woman will love any man that bothers her enough.  A man’s idee of romance is to do what he wants to, or to be comfortable; a woman’s idee of romance is to feel that she’s obliged to do what she really wants to do, under such circumstances as will allow her to call it a great sackerfice, or to be made uncomfortable, which is her real notion of comfort.  You have only to look at a woman’s housekeepin’ to reelize the restfulness she finds in keepin’ things disturbed all the time.  I have looked upon the housekeepin’ of enough Mrs. Scraggses to be able to speak with the v’ice of experience, if not the v’ice of wisdom.

“So Mrs. Maggy Watson, the lady of which I heretofore speak, become unamored of Pete during the time he was such a pesky nuisance around the place, an’ when he writ her, later, that he thought they’d orter form a close corporation an’ issue the holy bonds of matrimony, why, she writ him straight back again that the scheme had been in her mind for some time, and she’d ‘a’ mentioned it to him only it seemed like meddlin’ in his personal affairs.

“First off, it seems a-kind of unjustitude that a man like me should have a load of Mrs. Scraggses forced on him, whilest a man like Pete gets the kindest and obliginest sort of woman; but after all, I was able to take care of myself, and that bunch of wild cats, too, for a while, and Pete certainly needed a lady with a good disposition.  You’ll allus find, on investigatin’ things, that they ain’t a mite worse than you thought they was.  Mighty often it is the horny-handed foot of misfortune that kicks a man into the green pastures of prosperity—­the only question is:  kin he eat grass?