As I finished my allegory and looked down from the side of the house, where my eyes had been fastened in the rapped eloquence of thought, I see Josiah with a contented countenance, readin’ the almanac, and I said to him in a voice before which he quailed-- “Josiah Allen, you haint heard a word I’ve said, you know you haint.” “Yes I have,” says he, shettin’ up the almanac; “I heard you say wimmin ought to vote, and I say she hadn’t. I shall always say that she is too fraguile, too delikate, it would be too hard for her to go to the pole.” “There is one pole you are willin’ enough I should go to, Josiah Allen,” and I stopped allegorin’, and spoke with witherin’ dignity and self respect--“and that is the hop pole.” (Josiah has sot out a new hop yard, and he proudly brags to the neighbors that I am the fastest picker in the yard.) “You are willin’ enough I should handle them poles!” He looked smit and conscience struck, but still true to the inherient principles of his sect, and thier doggy obstinacy, he murmured-- “If wimmin know when they are well off, they will let poles and ’lection boxes alone, it is too wearin for the fair sect.” “Josiah Allen,” says I, “you think that for a woman to stand up straight on her feet, under a blazin’ sun, and lift both her arms above her head, and pick seven bushels of hops, mingled with worms and spiders, into a gigantic box, day in, and day out, is awful healthy, so strengthenin’ and stimulatin’ to wimmin, but when it comes to droppin’ a little slip of clean paper into a small seven by nine box, once a year in a shady room, you are afraid it is goin’ to break down a woman’s constitution to once.” He was speechless, and clung to Ayer’s almanac mechanically (as it were) and I continued-- “There is another pole you are willin’ enough for me to handle, and that is our cistern pole. If you should spend some of the breath you waste--in pityin’ the poor wimmin that have got to vote--in byin’ a pump, you would raise 25 cents in my estimation, Josiah Allen. You have let me pull on that old cistern pole thirteen years, and get a ten quart pail of water on to the end of it, and I guess the political pole wouldn’t draw much harder than that does.” “I guess I will get one, Samantha, when I sell the old critter. I have been a calculatin’ to every year, but things will kinder run along.” “I am aware of that,” says I in a tone of dignity cold as a lump of cold ice. “I am aware of that. You may go into any neighborhood you please, and if there is a family in it, where the wife has to set up leeches, make soap, cut her own kindlin’ wood, build fires in winter, set up stove-pipes, dround kittens, hang out clothes lines, cord beds, cut up pork, skin calves, and hatchel flax with a baby lashed to her side--I haint afraid to bet you a ten cent bill, that that woman’s husband thinks that wimmin are too feeble and delicate to go the pole.”