Around the World with Josiah Allen's WifeHolley, Marietta
General
Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife
Holley, Marietta
Women travelers -- Fiction
They have beautiful fountains in Rome. All of a sudden as we went
through a narrer street, we see a dazzlin' sheet of water come down
from the rock shell work and statutes, clear streams of water seemed
to be gushin' out on all sides, fallin' into a big reservoir big
enough for a ship to float in, and one day we went to see the Baths of
Caracella. Jest think of a bath a mile square, big enough for thirty
or forty thousand folks to bathe in at one time. It is all in ruins
now, but you can see from the thick walls, tall arches, the sides
covered with costly mosaic, what they wuz in their glory. Josiah
thought he could make a lovely piece of mosaic from the stuns down in
our paster and slate stuns. He said if he could cover the front of the
barn with the pictures of his travels in stun, some like the travels
of Ulysses, it would be a boon to Jonesville. But good land! it would
be a sight to behold made of stuns as big as your hand and all shapes.
That ambition must be squenched. Josiah breathed this aspiration to me
as we went through the Hall of the Emperors. And they didn't look no
better nor so well as the bretheren in the Jonesville meetin'-house
would if they wuz sculped and Josiah said so; though, of course, as I
told him, they wuz dressed up more fancy. And he said: "Any decent
woman would lend her nightgown for her pardner to be sculped in and
handkerchief pins and lace under-sleeves and things."
Poppea Sabina, the second wife of Mr. Nero, wuz a beautiful-lookin'
woman, though I don't spoze she wuz what she should be. Her husband
kicked her to death some time ago. He ort to been kicked himself; I'd
been willin' to hire the mule myself to done it, I wuz that put out
thinkin' on't.
Josiah said "Poppy Sabriny wuz the best-lookin' figger there."
Arvilly said she most knew he'd been drinkin', it wuz so fashionable
for drinkin' men to kick their wives, and sez she: "Oh, how I wish I
could have canvassed Nero for the 'Twin Crimes' before he done it."
And I sez: "It might have been a good thing for Mr. Nero and for
Poppy, but I don't know how it would have been with you, Arvilly; a
man that would kick his wife to death wouldn't be apt to brook a
book-agent."
"Yes," sez Josiah, "anybody that would kick Poppy Sabriny would do
anything."
Sez I: "It would look just as well, Josiah, for a perfessor not to
talk so much about another woman besides his pardner, even if she is a
stun woman."
"Jealous of a statter!" sez Josiah skornfully.
"Not at all," sez I. "But Poppea Sabina wuz a pagan, and no better
than she should be, and her folks wuzn't likely and----"
"Jest like a woman!" sez Josiah, "a man can't praise up another
female, dead or alive, without his pardner picking flaws in 'em."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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