But I sez, “You can’t prune apple trees into figgers, Josiah, it takes different trees, and that is too big anyway.”

“That’s a woman’s way of talkin’; I want her in heroic size, she’s worthy on’t.  I expect,” he went on, “the road will be jest lined with Jonesvillians, and we’l see ’em hangin’ over the orchard fence lookin’ on and admirin’ the beautiful statter, I think I can see her now, head up, tail out, mane a flutterin’—­you’ll see, Samantha.”

“Oh, dear!” sez I, “I expect I will see more than I want to.”

But goin’ on a little furder we see what put such vain and onpractical idees out of his head.  We wandered into a spot where there wuz old-fashioned flowers, such as grow in the green meadows and hedges of old England, and there wuz some old wimmen wrinkled and gray, poorly clad, lookin’ at them daisies and cow-slips and laughin’ and cryin’ over ’em.

They wuz fur from the old home and the summer time of youth and love, a half century of years and dreary wastes of sea and land lay between ’em, but these cow-slip blows and daisies took them back to their youth and the sunny fields they wandered in with the young lover whose eyes wuz as blue as the English violets, while their own cheeks wuz as rosy as the thorn flowers.

When the hull world lay hid in a rosy mist, and they wuz the centre of it, and life wuz new, and hope and happiness gilded the future, and the Fairy land of America wuz beckonin’ to ’em out of the rosy mist.

Fifty years of dusty, smoky tenement life, hard work, child-birth, rearing children, toil, disappointment, pain—­where wuz they?  They had all gone.  They wuz eighteen agin; they wuz pickin’ the rosy blooms in the dear home land, and love wuz whisperin’ to ’em that they wuz sweeter than the flowers.

I took out my snowy handkerchief and almost cried myself, the tears just run down my face, and Josiah blowed his nose on his bandanna, and I believe furtively wiped his eyes.  But men never love to betray such sentimental emotion, and most immegiately he asked me in a gruff tone for a fried cake, and I handed him one absently and as one who dreams, and we went on and met the girls at the rondevoo appointed.

I’d had my supper and wuz restin’ in my room, Molly and Blandina had gone for a walk accompanied by Billy Huff, and Josiah had gone down to set with grandpa Huff a spell, when Aunt Tryphena come in and said a lady wuz there to see me; I asked her who it wuz, and she said: 

“I don’t know, but guess it is some ‘big bug trash,’ ’tennyrate she come in a antymobile that stands to the door without hitchin’.”

I knowed in a minute it wuz Jane Olive Perkins and told her to bring her up to my room.  And she entered with more than her usual gushin’ warmth of manner, and told me the first thing that I grew better and younger lookin’ every year.

But I kinder waved the idee off and told her, I didn’t feel so young as I did twenty or thirty years ago.