Short stories; United States -- Social life and customs -- 19th century -- Fiction
(Don't you care. It's just her talk. If it isn't one thing it's another,
cleaning your shoes, or combing your hair, or brushing your clothes, or
using your handkerchief, or shutting the door softly, or holding your
spoon with your fingers and not in your fist, or keeping your finger out
of your glass when you drink--something the whole blessed time. Forever
and eternally picking at a fellow about something. And saying the same
thing over and over so many times. That's the worst of it!)
Pap and mother read over the seed catalogues, all about “warm, light
soils,” and “hardy annuals,” and “sow in drills four inches apart.” It
kind of hurries things along when you do that. In the south window of
the kitchen is a box full of black dirt in which will you look out what
you're doing? Little more and you'd have upset it. There are tomato
seeds in that, I'll have you know. Oh, yes, government seeds. Somebody
sends 'em, I don't know who. Congressman, I guess, whoever he is. I
don't pretend to keep track of 'em. And say. When was this watered last?
There it is. Unless I stand over you every minute--My land! If there's
anything done about this house I've got to do it.
Between the days when it can't make up its mind whether to snow or to
rain, and tries to do both at once, comes a day when it is warm enough
(almost) to go without an overcoat. The Sunday following you can hardly
hear what the preacher has to say for the whooping and barking. The
choir members have cough drops in their cheeks when they stand up to
sing, and everybody stops in at the drug store with: “Say, Doc, what's
good for a cold?”
Eggs have come down. Yesterday they were nine for a quarter; to-day
they're ten. Gildersleeve wants a dollar for a setting of eggs, but
he'll let you have the same number of eggs for thirty cents if you'll
wait till he can run a needle into each one. So afraid you'll raise
chickens of your own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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