I wish I knew where her grave is that
I might lay upon it a bunch of flowers, such as she knew and
liked--sweet-william, and phlox, and larkspur, and wild columbine. It
couldn't make it up to her for all the hardships she underwent when she
was bringing up a family in that wild, western country, and especially
that fall when they all had the "fever 'n' ager" so bad, Uriah and the
twins chilling one day, and Hiram and Sophronia Jane the next, and she
just as miserable as any of them, but keeping up somehow, God only knows
how. It couldn't make it up to her, but as I laid the pretty posies
against the leaning headstone on which is written:

"A Loving Wife, a Mother Dear,
Faithful Friend Lies Buried Here."

I believe she 'd get word of it somehow, and understand what I was
trying to say by it.

I'll ask to be let off the committee that judges the rest of the
exhibits in the Fine Arts Hall, the quilts and the Battenberg, and the
crocheting, and such. I know the Log Cabin pattern, and the
Mexican Feather pattern, and I think I could make out to tell the
Hen-and-Chickens pattern of quilts, but that's as much as ever. And as
to the real, hand-painted views of fruit-cake, and grapes and apples on
a red table-cloth, I am one of those that can't make allowances for the
fact that she only took two terms. I call to mind one picture that Miss
Alvalou Ashbaker made of her pap, old "Coonrod" Ashbaker. The Lord knows
he was a "humbly critter," but he wasn't as "humbly" as she made him out
to be, with his eyes bulging out of his head as if he was choking on a
fishbone. And, instead of her dressing him up in his Sunday clothes, I
wish I may never see the back of my neck if that girl didn't paint him
in a red-and-black barred flannel shirt, with porcelain buttons on it!
And his hair looked as if the calf had been at it. Wouldn't you think
somebody would have told her? And that isn't all. She got the premium!

Neither am I prepared to pass judgment on the fancy penmanship displayed
by Professor Swope, framed elegantly in black walnut, and gilt,
depicting a bounding deer, all made out of hair-line, shaded spirals,
done with his facile pen. (No wonder a deer can jump so, with all those
springs inside him.) Professor Swope writes visiting cards for you,
wonderful birds done in flourishes and holding ribbons in their bills.
He puts your name on the ribbon place. Neatest and tastiest thing you
can imagine. I like to watch him do it,