“Then Keturah sassed him and said if a straw showed the direction of the wind in Jonesville, how wuz it with the dead loads and stacks of straw in Washington, sez she, they’re so heavy with rottenness and corruption they can’t blow.  You’ll remember that powerful figger of speech in the article.  I told her it would make you mad as a hen and I spoze it did.  And I felt it my duty to molify you and tell you that a honester creeter never lived than Keturah, and it wuz only these extronnery circumstances that made her borry the ten cents.  And workin’ out by the day and eatin’ codfish as she duz, makes her more morbid, kinder salts her blood I believe, and she lays it to you onjustly, for meat bein’ so high that she can’t buy any.

“Ive told her time and agin it wuzn’t your fault.  But she sez you might hold in the Trusts some if you wuz a minter.

“She sez you had ’em in your power once and could made a sample on ’em but didn’t, and so, sez she, I’ve got to live on codfish, and the flour trust is bringin’ up flour so Id’no but I’ll have to eat saw-dust bread.  You remember them powerful metafors in the Auger.  I wanted to explain all this and I also had some errents of my own.”

He made another effort to speak, but knowin’ his remarkable eloquence, and that I wouldn’t try to git a word in after he begun, I should enjoy his talk so, I kep’ on: 

“I want to be open and above board, Theodore, jest as you are nachelly.  And that other piece you remember that come out about the same time in the Jonesville Gimlet I’ll tell you plain that I approved on it, though I didn’t write it.  You remember it begun with this quotation: 

“’They enslave their children’s children
Who make compromise with sin.’

“And it went on to talk about our great dignified Nation bein’ a pardner in Saloons, ruinin’ men, breakin’ wimmen’s hearts, starvin’ children, committin’ theft, murder, adultery, arson, helpin’ on fights, death and ruin, jest goin’ in snux, as you may say with all this for the money got out of it; it said that though there wuz many great evils to face and overthrow, there wuz none that brutalized the race and agonized the hearts of the people like this, and though all sin left its mark, no other sin changed a man so into the loathsome body and soul wrecks, that drunkenness did, and all for a little money.

“It wuz a powerful piece, and as full of facts as a brick is of sand.  It told jest how much money Uncle Sam got out of every drunkard he made.  My memory hain’t what it wuz, Theodore, and I can’t tell exactly jest how much money it would be in Uncle Sam’s pocket to make your four bright good boys drunkards, and finish up the job and land ’em in the drunkard’s grave, via the saloon and gutter.  But if you stood by and see it goin’ on before your face as so many thousands of proud and lovin’ fathers have to, you would think a million dollars of such blood money wuz too cheap, yes indeed!