ur, for it wuz too cold, and
I was too tired, "There hain't but one sea, Josiah Allen, that is calm
forever, and one day we will float upon it, you and me. It is the sea
by which angels walk and look down into its crystal depths, and behold
their blessed faces. It is the sea on whose banks the fadeless lilies
blow--and that mirrors the soft, cloudless sky of the Happy Morning. It
is the sea of Eternal Repose, that rude blasts can never blow up into
billows. But our sea--the sea of married life--is not like that, it is
ofttimes billowy and rough."

"I say it hain't," sez he, for he was jest carried away with the
lecture, and enthused. "We have had a happy time together, Josiah Allen,
for over twenty years, but has our sea of life always been perfectly
smooth?"

"Yes, it has; smooth as glass."

"Hain't there never been a cloud in our sky?"

"No, there hain't; not a dumb cloud."

Sez I, sternly, "There has in mine. Your wicked and profane swearin' has
cast many and many a cloud over my sky, and I'd try to curb in my tongue
if I was in your place."

"'Dumb' hain't swearin'," sez he. And then he didn't say nothin' more
till anon, or nearly at that time, he broke out agin, and sez he:

"Never, never did I hear or see such eloquence till to-night I'll have
that girl down to our house to stay a week, if I'm a living Josiah
Allen."

"All right," sez I, cheerfully. "I'd love to have her stay a week or
ten days, and I'll invite her, too, when she comes down to rehearse her
lecture."

Wall we got home middlin' tired, and the subject kinder dropped down,
and Josiah had lots of work come on the next day, and so did I, and
company. And it run along for over a week before she come. And when she
did come, it wuz in a dreadful bad time. It seems as if she couldn't
have come in a much worse time.

It wuz early one mornin', not more than nine o'clock, if it wuz that.
There had come on a cold snap of weather unexpected, and Josiah wuz
a-bringin' in the cook stove from the summer kitchen, when she come.

Josiah Allen is a good man. He is my choice out of a world full of men,
but I can't conceal it from myself that his words at such a time are
always voyalent, and his demeanor is not the demeanor that I would wish
to have showed off to the public.

He wuz at the worst place, too. He had got the stove wedged into the
entry-way door, and couldn't get it either way. He had acted awkward
with it, and I told him so, and he see it w