And truly, if anybody is goin’ to set up in the worry business, nights is the best time for it in the hull twenty-four hours; middlin’-sized troubles swell out so in the dark; tribulations that haint by daylight much bigger’n a pipes-tail, at midnight will look bigger’n a barn. I declare for’t, I’ve had bunnets before now, that didn’t suit me,—was trimmed up too gay, or come over my face too much, or sunthin’, and when I’d wake up in the night and think on ’em, they’d look as big to me as a bushel basket, and humblier; and I’d lay and sweat to think of ever wearin’ ’em to meetin’; but at daylight, they would kinder dwindle down again to their natural shape. And so with other sufferin’s that come tougher to me to bear. When I was a bringin’ up Thomas Jefferson, tryin’ to git him headed right, how many times he has stood before me at midnight a black-leg—his legs as black as a coal, both of ’em;—a pirate; a burglar; he has burgled his pa and me, night after night; set Jonesville afire; burnt New York village to ashes; and has swung himself on the gallows. And Tirzah Ann has had cancers; and childern; and consumptions; and has been eloped with; and drownded in the canal, night after night; but good land! in the mornin’ the childern was all right. The sunshine would shine into my heart like the promises in the Bible to them that try to bring up their childern in the fear of the Lord; and I could lay holt of them promises and feel first rate. And Josiah Allen! I s’pose I have buried that man as many times as he has got hairs on his head, (he is pretty bald) when he’d have a cold or anything. I’d wake up in the latter part of the night, when it was dark as Egyptian darkness, and I’d git to thinkin’ and worryin’, and before I knew it, there Josiah would be all laid out and the procession a meanderin’ off towards Jonesville buryin’ ground, and I a follerin’ him, a weepin’ widder. And there I’d lay and sweat about it; and I’ve gone so far as to see myself lay dead by the side of him, killed by the feelin’s I felt for that man; and there we’d lay, with one stun over us, a readin’: “Here lays Josiah and Samantha; Their warfare is accomplished.” Oh! nobody knows the feelin’s I would feel there in the dead of night, with Josiah a snorin’ peacefully by my side. But jest as quick as the sun would rise up and build up his fire in the east, and Josiah would rise up and build up his fire in the stove, why them ghosts of fears and anxieties that haunted me, would, in the language of the poem Thomas J. was readin’ the other day:—Fold up their tents like an Arab man and silently go to stealin’ somewhere else. And I’d git up and git a splendid breakfast, and Josiah and I would enjoy ourselves first rate.