Bowery; I wuzn't goin' to nasty up my
mind with it, though I hearn there wuz some good things to be seen
there. Folks told me I'd ort to gone to Brighton, and Atlantic City,
and see the milds of beautiful Pleasure places along the ocean, but I
sez, "I thank you, but I've seen enough," though there wuz sights
there that I would loved to see.

Among 'em wuz that Mother's Camp, where thousands and thousands of
poor children and their mas go to spend a day in the bracin'
atmosphere. And the children have pure milk, and their mas good tea,
and they can go there day after day all they want to. How the children
look forward to it, and their mas too.

[Illustration: "_I myself never sot foot on the Bowery; I wuzn't goin'
to nasty up my mind with it, though I hearn there wuz some
good things to be seen there._" (_See page 313_)]

The goodness and helpfulness of such places along the beach, wrops
their bright mantillys over some of the other places not so good and
makes folks more lenitent to 'em, as they endure a poor husband for
the sake of his good wife, and visey versey.

A few days after we got home, Josiah took Penstock and they sot off
for a two weeks' stay at Shadow Island. And a few days after they got
there he writ me that they had broke ground for the cottage. And that
very day I got my feet wet down to the creek paster huntin' for a
turkey's nest, and come down with inflamatory rumatiz, and couldn't
walk a step for upwards of four weeks, and Ury's wife come and took
care on me. My head felt bad too, Coney Island had been too much for
me--

Well, Josiah would come home Sundays all wrought up and enthusiastick
boastin' what a model house it wuz, jest perfect, and what new and
magnificent discoveries he had made to lighten labor, which he wuz
goin' to git patented and probable make our everlastin' fortune, as
well as make Tirzah Ann perfectly happy. And I'd set with my foot on a
piller, and hear him go on and forebode and forebode, and I groaned
more about the house than I did with the pain in my lim, though that
wuz fearful.

Well, after it had been goin' on for about four weeks, one Saturday
when he come home over Sunday, he said the house wuz all up and
nearin' completion, and he carried the idee if he didn't come right
out and say it, that there wuzn't a mansion in the New Jerusalem that
went ahead on't. My rumatiz and head wuz quite a little better, and he
proposed that I should go back with him Monday morn