“This is your perfectly noiseless apparatus is it?” sez he pintin’ down towards the thunderin’ roar, “this is your summer heat, hain’t it?” pintin’ to the shiverin’ crowd.  “This is your freedom from labor-two-pails-a-year job! one hundred pails of water have I lugged upstairs to-night if I have a pint!  Now,” sez he, makin’ towards him, “do you start out of this house before I fall on you and rend you.”  Karen screamed and rushed between ’em and fell onto Jabez and dragged him off with her, he seemin’ glad to go.

Well, we let the fire go down as low as we could without goin’ out, and went to bed shiverin’ and half froze, but with soap stuns and hot-water bags we made out to git through the night.  In the mornin’ a sorry seen greeted us, coldness, discomfort, broken plasterin’ and dirt, and no prospect to all appearance of havin’ any better times.  The only gleam of light I could see in the hull prospect wuz that Josiah in his excitement and wretchedness had seemin’ly forgot that he’d ever mentioned the Exposition of St. Josiah.

Well, right after breakfast Karen come over lookin’ as if she hadn’t slep’ a wink and sez she, “Jabez lay awake all night studyin’ on it and he knows now where he made the mistake, he pinted one small lead pipe up where it ort to been pinted down, he can make it all right in an hour.”

Well, Josiah, so sure it is that the hottest love soonest cools, vowed that Jabez should never step his foot into the house agin.  And I wuz glad enough to see that Rosy agreed with him.

But I wuz naterally made more megum, and thought, any port in a storm, and a hour won’t be much anyway.  If we’ve stood all this dirt and confusion for five weeks we could stand it a hour longer.

“Well,” sez Josiah, “I shall go into the woods for a jag of maple, I won’t see him, I dassent, for I should fall on him and destroy him if I did.”

So he went after a load of maple wood and Jabez come and tinkered and hammered and pounded and then sayin’ with some of his pride returned into his port: 

“It will go now like clock work.”

He filled the tank and lit the fire agin with Ury’s help.  But I wuz glad enough that Josiah wuz absent, for this time the noise wuz so skairful that when Ury ketched Philury round the waist and absconded with her, he didn’t stop till they had ploughed through the snow clear past the old hen house.

I, too, ketched Rosy by the arm and run and stumbled along most to the barn before I remembered myself and regained my faculties, so to speak, it wuz so turrible this time the loud, angry, roarin’, hissin’ noise.