Sez he, “The first work I do when I git home will be to git a hat for the old mair; I won’t have to buy one, Tirzah Ann’s last summer hat will be jest the thing.  You know that one trimmed with red roses and shiffon and long lace streamers.  Your hats ain’t dressy enough; why the old mair hain’t quite twenty-one, hain’t old enough to vote even if her sect had the privelige.  She’s young and ort to dress young.  That hat will be jest the thing.  And what a sensation we will make enterin’ Jonesville on a Sunday mornin’, the mair, myself and you, we shall attract world-wide attention.”  But that minute we got to the gate and entered in.  I never shall ride after the mair with a hat on, and pink roses and long lace streamers, never.  But didn’t argey about it.

Well, Josiah couldn’t be held off any longer, he would go to the Pike that mornin’; I told him it wuzn’t writ in my pad.

And he sez, “Dum that pad!  Am I goin’ to be held in by that pad, and led round by it all summer?  I’m goin’ to the Pike to-day and you can do as you’re a minter.”  And Blandina jined in of course and said that if dear Uncle Josiah’s mind wuz sot on it it wuz best to go, and she sez kinder low to me, “it wuzn’t right to cross a man unless it wuz absolutely necessary.”

I wuz goin’ to twit her and tell her that as first chaperone I wuz the one to settle these matters, but I see Josiah wuz gittin’ too agitated, one look at his gloomy face made me think of the past, and I gin in as gracefully as I could, and we wended our way thither with no more parley, and Josiah, as soon as our heads wuz turned that way, begun to brighten up and look better, and so about one-half of my mind and sperit wuz satisfied.  And sometimes I think you can’t be satisfied any more than that on this spear wherever you go, and whatever you see, specially if you have a man to deal with that is more or less fraxious and worrisome.  To ease his mind and temper you’ll git led into strange and devious paths time and agin.

But to resoom forward.  The Four Cowboys on a Tear guardin’ the entrance to the Pike confronted us and in their wild and boysterous hilarity seemed to my agitated and forebodin’ sperit to shadow forth what we would find inside their domain.  They wuz a strange and skairful set, their clothes wuz rough and disheveled and so wuz their linements.  They all on ’em brandished aloft a pistol, seemin’ to be on the lookout for someone to shoot.  Their horses wuz on the dead gallop and you knowed by the expression on their faces jest what blood curdlin’ yells wuz issuin’ from their throats.

Why, if you’ll believe it they wuz goin’ at such a gallopin’ prancin’ gait that the feet of one of their horses never touched the ground, all four of his feet wuz gallopin’ through the air.  Josiah sez as he looked at it: 

“I would give a dollar bill to Ury in a minute if he could learn the colt to do that trick, gallop along without his feet touchin’ the ground.  Jest think what a sensation it would make to the Jonesville fair.  The old mair is too old of course to git the trick.”