"Oh, gracious heavens, Josiah! how can we men ever stand up under that!" But I went on, turnin' the knife in the wownd, "Mr. Kittie Brown, Mr. Nellie Jones! What do you think of that, Simon?" He groaned and sithed but didn't say nothin'; it seemed as if the very idee had fairly stunted him, and I kep' still and meditated and my mind roamed back to the humiliatin' time when I laid my onwillin' nose on the grindstun, or ruther it wuz laid on for me and held there, and I signed a piece of poetry I had writ "Samantha Allen's Husband." It hain't no use to go into the petickulars and tell all about the means employed to git me under such mortifyin' subjugation. Vittles had sunthin' to do with it, and I hain't goin' to tell no furder. But never, never shall I forgit my meachin' and downtrod linement as I surveyed it in the glass when I wuz shavin' jest afterwards. Shavin' a beard! that very act riz up and asserted the supremacy of my sect and mocked the move I had made. Oh, the sufferin's of that occasion and my vain efforts to git out of it. But Samantha never sympathized with me a mite. She said, "You've seen me doin' the same thing for years and enjoyed it, and what is sass for the gander ort to be sass for the goose." There is another proof of wimmen's infringin'; she turned that familiar old sayin' right round to carry her pint, and put the goose where the gander always had been, and ort to be. I tell you there hain't no length a female won't go to to carry the day and infringe on men's rights. And you might as well git blood from a white turnip as to git any pity and sympathy from 'em for my downtrod sect. For when I mentioned to Samantha my turrible forebodin' about my sect havin' to take wimmen's names at the altar, and asked her if she could begin to realize what men's humiliated and despairin' feelin's would be at such a time, she up and sez: "Do you realize what wimmen's feelin's are at the altar? She's had to stand it. No matter how romantic and beautiful her name wuz, Miss Victoria Angela Chesterfield has had to change it for Miss Ichabod Tubbs, or Miss Peleg Hogg. "And," sez she, "if she has a big propputy and married a man so poor he had to borry his weddin' shirt, she had to hear him say, 'With all my worldly goods I thee endow,' when all them goods wuz a pile of debts she had to pay for him, but she had to stand it and couldn't snicker, for it wuzn't a snickerin' time. "And a great able bodied business woman had to promise to obey a little snip of a boy, when they both knew she wuz lyin', with a priest hearin' the lie and givin' it his blessin'. My sect has had to stand considerable from yourn," sez Samantha. No, I didn't git a mite of sympathy from her, and might have knowed it, and I'd better not said a word to her about my forebodin's.