"Yes, indeed!" sez Betsy eagerly. "Our two idees about the loftier, superior sect, and the overpowerin' need of wimmen to be protected by 'em, are perfect twins, you couldn't hardly reconize 'em apart." And agin she sez in a still more hungry axent: "Do grant my request, Josiah Allen; poetry makes a book so interestin'. Mebby it hain't necessary, but some like the tail feathers of a rooster, though they may not add to the weight of the fowl; without 'em he has a bare lonesome look. Poetry may not add to the strength and matchless power of your arguments, probably nothin' could; but somehow a book looks sort o' bare and lonely without these feathery gushin's of the soul." Sez I in a cold austere axent, "I have laid out to enrich the prose pages of my great work with my own poetry, some as lovely flowers might appear on the smooth side of a volcano, softenin' and amelioratin' the comin' roar and rush of the destroyin' fire and flames, that is to bust out and burn up Error and mistook idees in females." "Oh, what eloquence! what grand thoughts!" sez Betsy claspin' her yeller cotton gloves together, and lookin' up to me in almost worship. "What a inteleck has been burnin' under that bald head for years. No wonder it is bald, no hair could live in such a fiery atmosphere." As she said this my feelin's softened towards her and I felt different than I did feel. I had never liked Betsy Bobbett Slimpsey; she wuz always too sentimental and persistent to suit me. When I wuz a widow man she paid me a lot of attention oninvited and onrecipercated. I never responded to her ardent overtoors. I spurned her poetry from me. And she wuz a slack housekeeper, and mizuble cook, which always riles men, and I felt relieved and glad when she got round Simon Slimpsey and won him to be her husband. But I do like her idees on man's supremacy and her clingin' idees on marriage. Such voylent and persistent efforts in that direction, by elderly onmarried females are esteemed worthy of every man's admiration, when directed in another direction than himself. I own I suffered from them clingin' idees of hern durin' my widowerhood till Samantha rendered me immune. But under all them sufferin's of mine and my almost hopeless efforts to shy off from her, and avoid her, yet I felt that her adorin' love and her warm clingin' attentions to males wuz eminently becomin' to a female if only turned off from me onto some more willin' man. All these thoughts chased each other through my brain, but still I kep' the cool superiority of my sect and sez coldly: "I want no female thought to cumber and weigh down the sails of my skyward bound volume."