Sposen’ Baptists do love water better’n they do dry land? What of it? If my Baptist brethren feel any better to baptise thierselves in the Atlantic ocian, it haint none of my business. Somehow Josiah seems to be more sot onto his own meetin’ house than I do. Thomas Jefferson said when we was a arguin’ about it the mornin’ of the quiltin’, says he, “The more water the better,” says he, “it would do some of the brethren good to put ’em asoak and let ’em lay over night.” I shet him up pretty quick, for I will not countenance such light talk--but Josiah laughed, he encourages that boy in it, all I can do and say. I always make a pint of goin’ to quiltin’s any way, whether I go on Methodist principle (as in this case) or not, for you can’t be backbited to your face, that is a moral certainty. I know women jest like a book, for I have been one quite a spell. I always stand up for my own sect, still I know sartin effects foller sartin causes. Such as two bricks bein’ sot up side by side, if one tumbles over on to the other, the other can’t stand up, it haint natur. If a toper holds a glass of liquor to his mouth he can’t help swallowin’ it, it haint nater. If a young man goes out slay-ridin’ with a pretty girl, and the buffalo robe slips off, he can’t help holdin’ it round her, it haint nater. And quiltin’ jest sets women to slanderin’ as easy and beautiful as any thing you ever see. I was the first one there, for reasons I have named; I always go early. I hadn’t been there long before Mrs. Deacon Dobbins came, and then the Widder Tubbs, and then Squire Edwards’es wife and Maggie Snow, and then the Dagget girls. (We call ’em _girls_, though it would be jest as proper to call mutton, lamb.) Miss Wilkins’ baby had the mumps, and the Peedicks and Gowdey’s had unexpected company. But with Miss Jones where the quiltin’ was held, and her girls Mary Ann and Alzina, we made as many as could get round the quilt handy. The quilt was made of different kinds of calico; all the women round had pieced up a block or two, and we took up a collection to get the battin’ and linin’ and the cloth to set it together with, which was turkey red, and come to quilt it, it looked well. We quilted it herrin’ bone, with a runnin’ vine round the border. After the pathmaster was demorilized, the school-teacher tore to pieces, the party to Peedicks scandalized, Sophronia Gowdey’s charicter broke doun--and her mother’s new bunnet pronounced a perfect fright, and twenty years too young for her--and Miss Wilkins’ baby voted a unquestionable idiot, and the rest of the unrepresented neighborhood dealt with, Lucinda Dagget spoke up and says she-- “I hope the minister will like the bedquilt.” (Lucinda is the one that studies mathematics to harden her mind, and has the Roman nose.) “It haint no ways likely he will,” says her sister Ophelia; (she is the one that frizzles her hair on top and wears spectacles.) “It haint no ways likely he will--for he is a cold man, a stun statute.”