“Accordeon!” sez I.  “You couldn’t git his mind offen that plan if you gin him one of the golden harps we read about.”

Tirzah Ann subsided, only sayin’:  “We would all be the town’s talk, and it would probable kill her with mortification.”

Thomas J. sot still with his brow knit in deep thought and sez “I will try one thing more.”

I never knew exactly how Thomas J. worked it, or what he paid ’em, but I know that a day or two after, the prices them livin’ statutes asked Josiah for bein’ whitewashed, wuz sunthin’ perfectly exorbitant, and so with the Powers and the Peaceful Inventors.  He never could stood it with his closeness.

Thomas J. didn’t appear outwardly, but wuz the power behind the thrones, so I spoze.  When Josiah wuz taxed with these fearful expenses (they writ it in letters to him) his plan tottled ready to fall.  And of course I stood ready and follered it up with eloquent arguments, tenderness and the very best of vittles.  Neither on ’em could carried the day alone, but all together conquered.  He gin in.  The plan tottered over and fell onto him, and my pardner, to continue the metafor, lay under the ruins as squshed and mute as if he wuz never goin’ to git up agin.

But when his wild emotions of ambition and vanity and display wuz all broke up a settled melancholy hovered down onto him and draped him like a black mantilly.  He seemed all onstrung, and all my efforts to string him up agin seemed vain.

I strove to hide my apprehensions under a holler veil of calmness and even hilarity; I give him catnip with a smile on my lip but deep forebodin’ in my mind, and the same with thoroughwert.  But catnip didn’t nip his ambition and thoroughwort wuzn’t thorough enough to restore his cheerfulness.

I encouraged him to go to the lake fishin’ with Deacon Henzy, though I’d suffered more than I had ever told from similar occasions.  Deacon Henzy loves hard cider and keeps a kag on tap durin’ the summer, he sez it is for his liver, but liver or no liver it hain’t right.

I hain’t goin’ to make no insinuations about their doin’s though sister Henzy has approached me on the subject time and agin, she hain’t so clost mouthed as I am.  But I will merely say that when they got back their two breaths didn’t smell as two deacon’s breaths ort to smell.  But I didn’t say nothin’ about it outside and shan’t, I use tack.  I spoke on’t to Josiah at the time, yes indeed I hearn the call of Duty and obeyed.

But as I wuz sayin’, though it trompled on all my feelin’s and forebodin’s I urged ’em to go agin and they went.  And I shan’t tell how their breaths smelt when they got back—­it hain’t best, only simply sayin’ that Josiah took an empty pint fruit can with him that mornin’ when he went over to the Deacon’s to start, and I never inquired what he took it for, so fur will a female let even her principles be outraged when the life of her beloved companion is at the stake—­I tried to think he wuz goin’ to take milk in it.