Around the World with Josiah Allen's WifeHolley, Marietta
General
Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife
Holley, Marietta
Women travelers -- Fiction
As Josiah laid down under it he said words I wouldn't have had Elder
Minkley heard for a dollar bill, and it didn't nigh cover his feet
anyway. What to do I didn't know, for it wuz late and I spozed the
woman of the house had gone to bed and I didn't want to roust her up.
And I knew anyway it would mortify her dretfully to have her help make
such a mistake. Good land! if Philury should do such a thing I should
feel like a fool. So I had Josiah git up, still talkin' language onfit
for a deacon and a perfessor, and I put the bed where it belonged,
spread the sheets over it smooth, put my warm woollen shawl and our
railway rug on it and made a splendid bed.
The food wuz quite good, though sassage and cheese wuz too much in
evidence, and beer and pipes and bears. I always kinder spleened
aginst bears and wuz afraid on 'em and wouldn't take one for a
present, but it beat all how much they seem to think of bears there,
namin' the place for 'em to start with, and they have bears carved and
painted on most everything. Bears spout water out of their mouths in
the fountains, they have dead ones in their museums, and they have a
big bear den down by the river where great live ones can growl and act
all they want to. And bears show off in a wonderful clock tower they
have built way back in the 'leventh century. I never see Tommy so
delighted with anything hardly as he wuz with that, and Josiah too.
Every hour a procession of bears come out, led, I believe, by a
rooster who claps his wings and crows, and then they walk round a old
man with a hour glass who strikes the hour on a bell. But the bears
lead the programmy and bow and strut round and act.
The manufactures of Berne are mostly cloth, silk and cotton, straw
hats, etc. It has a great university with seventy-three professors.
Good land! if each one on 'em knowed a little and would teach it they
ort to keep a first-rate school.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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