When crash! bang! down come the partition with a half dressed man on top, brandishin’ aloft a boot and screamin’ like a painter, as wuz only natural.  He broke right into Love’s Sweet Realm and skairt ’em into fits.

She fell to once into highstericks, and he, when he recovered conscientiousness threatened to lick the man, and everybody in St. Louis, and made the air blue with conversation that the Realm of Love never ort to hearn on, and wouldn’t probable for years and years if it hadn’t been for this contrary temps.

I hearn this, but don’t say it is so; you can hear most anything and it held us in all right.

The next day, bein’ Sunday, Josiah thought it would be our duty to stay on the Fair ground and see the Pike, etc.  But I sez:  “Josiah, we will begin this hefty job right, we will go to meetin’.”

So we went out into the city and hunted up a M.E. meetin’ house and hearn a good sermon and went into class meetin’ and gin testimonies both on us.  And Blandina bein’ asked to by a man went forward for prayers and sot for a spell on the sinners’ bench.  She’s been a member for years, but she’s such a clever creeter she wants to obleege everybody.

Well, havin’ done our three duties we went back peaceful and pious in frame and went to walk in of course to our own temporary home.  But what do you think! that misuble, cheatin’ man at the gate asked us to pay to git in.  We hearn afterward that this wuz a dishonest man and wuz sent off.

“Pay!” sez Josiah.  “Pay to come home from meetin’?  Did you want us to hang round the meetin’ house all day and sleep on the steps?  Or what did you want?”

The man kep’ that stuny look onto him and sez, “Fifty cents each.”

Josiah fairly trembled with rage as he handed out the money, and sez he in a threatenin’ way, “You hain’t hearn the last of this, young man.  Square Baker of Jonesville will git onto your tracks, and you’d better have a tiger after you than have him when he’s rousted up.  Pay for comin’ home from meetin’, it is a disgrace to the nation!  Call this a land of liberty when you have to pay for comin’ home from meetin’!”

And sez he, as he took his change back, “Do you know what you’re doin’?  You’re drivin’ Samantha and me away from this place, and Blandina.”  And sez he, with an air of shootin’ his sharpest arrer, “We shall go to Miss Huff’s to-morry.”

And so we did.  Blandina and I wanted to go there in the first place, so we felt well about it.  We had fulfilled our duties as chaperones to the fullest extent, and had also got our own two ways in the end, which is always comfortin’ to a woman.

We found Miss Huff settled in a pleasant street in a good comfortable home, not so very fur away from the Fair ground.  She’s a widder with one son, young and good lookin’, jest home from school; and a aged parent, toothless and no more hair on his head than on the cover of my glass butter dish.  And I’ll be hanged if I knowed which one on ’em Blandina paid the most devoted attention to whilst we wuz there, but nothin’ light and triflin’.