It is a sermon better than is often preached, what you see there in that little theatre.  It is Love and Labor and Beauty and Joy walkin’ hand in hand.  I wuz highly tickled with it, and spent a glad hour here.

But Josiah and I thought we’d seen enough for one day, and would go home.  But Blandina wanted to look over the articles of men’s wearin’ apparell a little more; I don’t see what comfort they wuz to her but she said, “They brought back memories.”  And I spoze they did make her think of Teeter and mebby his possible successor.  But one thing, I believe, that made her want to stay, we met Billy Huff jest as we wuz comin’ out of the buildin’, and Blandina proposed that she should stay a little longer with him and I gin a willin’ consent, more willin’ it seemed to me than Billy wuz, though he couldn’t refuse to escort home a guest of the house.

But Josiah and I went home and both on us used some anarky on our tired limbs, and he cleaned the mud offen our shoes, for truly it wuz faithful and stuck by us.

It had rained the night before and that made it dretful muddy, Josiah acted real grouty about it and sot there mutterin’ and complainin’ about the mud till I got kinder wore out and sez: 

“For mercy sake!  I guess you’ve seen mud before, Josiah Allen.  Think of our Jonesville streets after a heavy rain.”

“Well, they never wuz so muddy that I lost the old mair in ’em, and a man told me to-day that they lost a elephant here the other day, it went right down in the mud out of sight, and they never see hide or hair of him agin.”

“Don’t you believe that, Josiah Allen; it hain’t no such thing, I hearn all about it, the elephant didn’t go clear in.  He didn’t go more than half in, they could see his back all the time and they got him out all right.”

“Well, that’s furder in the mud than the old mair ever went enough sight, and I never could have faced my country agin, if the streets had been so muddy at my Exposition.”

“Don’t be pickin’ flaws all the time, Josiah.  There is enough of beauty and grandeur here to satisfy any common man.”

“But I hain’t a common man, Samantha, and never wuz called so.”

“Well, oncommon then, there is enough beauty here to satisfy an oncommon man.”

That seemed to molify him, and he gin in that it wuz a pretty good show.  But in many things inferior to what hisen would have been if he’d carried it out.  But I discouraged all such morbid idees and led his mind off onto sunthin’ else.

That evenin’ whilst Josiah went out to mail a letter Blandina come into my room and sez the first thing, “Aunt Samantha, I love him passionately but my love is scorned by him.”

And she busted into tears.  I didn’t ask no questions, but from Billy’s icy demeanor at supper table and Blandina’s sentimental grief-stricken linement I mistrusted she’d made overtoors to him that had been rejected.