r be a-goin'."
I thought it wouldn't do no good to argue any more with her, and Josiah
started off after the mair. He had hitched it on the barn floor.

She didn't seem willin' to have me go; she seemed to cling to me. She
seemed to be a good, affectionate little creetur. And she said she would
give anything almost if she could rehearse the hull lecture over to me,
and have me criticise it. Sez she:

"I have heard so much about you, and what a happy home you have."

"Yes," sez I, "it is as happy as the average of happy homes, any way."

And sez she, "I have heard that you and your husband wuz just devoted to
each other." And I told her "that our love for each other wuz like two
rocks that couldn't be moved."

And she said, "On these very accounts she fairly hankered after my
advice and criticism. She said she hadn't never lived in any house where
there wuz a livin' man, her father havin' died several months before she
was born; and she hadn't had the experience that I had, and she presumed
that I could give her several little idees that she hadn't thought on."

And I told her calmly "that I presumed I could."

It seemed that her father died two months after marriage, right in the
midst of the mellow light of the honeymoon, before he had had time to
drop the exstatic sweetness of courtship and newly-married bliss and
come down into the ordinary, everyday, good and bad demeanors of men.

And she had always lived with her mother (who naturally worshipped
and mentally knelt before the memory of her lost husband) and three
sentimental maiden aunts. And they had drawed all their knowledge of
manhood from Moore's poems and Solomon's Songs. So Serena Fogg's idees
of men and married life wuz about as thin and as well suited to stand
the wear and tear of actual experience as a gauze dress would be to face
a Greenland winter in.

And so, after considerable urgin' on her part (for I kinder hung back
and hated to tackle the job, but not knowin' but that it wuz duty's
call), I finally consented, and it wuz arranged this way:

She wuz to come down to our house some day, early in the mornin', and
stay all day, and she wuz to stand up in front of me and rehearse the
lecture over to me, and I wuz to set and hear it, and when she came to a
place where I didn't agree with her I wuz to lift up my right hand and
she wuz to stop rehearsin', and we wuz to argue with each other back and
forth and try to convince each other.

And whe