“And pickin’ black-caps and strawberries, and churnin’ big churnin’s of butter, and pickin’ wool, to say nothin’ of onexpected company comin’, and no girl.  Let a lot of company come to stay all day the relations on your side and the work not done, and me posin’ like a statute, lookin’ down on you and your sect, you’d feel like a fool and jaw, you know you would.  I presoom you’d throw your boot-jack at me and threaten to part with me, and how mean that would be in you when I did it at your request.  ’Tain’t anything any woman would go into if she wuz let alone.”

“And then think of the thrashers and silo fillers comin’ in hungry as bears, what would they say?  No dinner cookin’ and I on a pedestal, why it would be the town’s talk.  Or you comin’ home from Jonesville on a cold night fraxious as a dog and sayin’ you should die off if you didn’t have supper in ten minutes.  How could I git it on time perched up there?

“I say it can’t be done, and it is onreasonable for men to want it, and at the same time want wimmen to do her own housework.  For these men, every one on ’em, would act like fury if their house wuzn’t clean and their clothes in order, and meals on time.  And you must know it would jest about kill a woman to be doin’ all this and histin’ herself up and down a hundred times a day, and mebby half dead with rumatiz too.  Why, it would be worse for me than all the rest of my work, and you hadn’t ort to ask it of me.”

Josiah looked real huffy and sez, “I hain’t the only man that’s wantin’ it done; men have always been sot on it.  There’s been more’n a wagon load of poetry writ on it and you know it.  Men have always said a sight about it, I hain’t alone in it,” he snapped out.

“No,” sez I honestly, “I’ve hearn it before.  But you see it wouldn’t work, don’t you?  And I believe I could convince every man if I could git to ’em and talk it over with ’em.  And I don’t see where the beauty on’t would come in; of course a woman couldn’t change her clothes and put on Greek drapery right in the midst of cleanin’ the buttery shelves or moppin’ off the back steps.  And to see a woman standin’ up on a pedestal with an old calico dress pinned up round her waist and a slat sunbunnet on and her pardner’s rubber boots, and her sleeves rolled up, and her face red as blood with hard work, and her hands all swelled up with hot soap suds and lye, what beauty would there be in it?  It always did seem onreasonable besides bein’ so tuckerin’ no woman could stand it for a day.”

He looked mad as a hen and sez he, “They could manage it if their minds wuz strong enough.”

Sez I, “It seems to me it would depend more on the strength of their legs, specially if the pedestal wuz a high one.  I never could git up onto it at all if I should go into it without gittin’ up on a chair and then on a table.  No woman no matter how strong she wuz could git more than two meals a day under the circumstances.”