You see the way on’t is, I sot out in married life determined to do as well or better by the relations on his side than I did by them on my own side. I wuz bound to do well by the hull on ’em, jest bound to. But I made up my mind like iron that I would stand more, take more sass, be more obleegin’, and suffer and be calm more from hisen than from mine, and I would do awful, awful well by both sides. And it wuz these beliefs carried out and spread out into practice that caused my agonies and my sufferin’s that I went through for weeks. The way on’t wuz, I had a letter from the city from my great-aunt Melinda Lyons, a tellin’ me that her oldest girl, Melinda Ann (a old maiden), wuz all run down with nervous prostration, nervous fits and things, and she asked me if I would be willin’ to have her come down into the country and stay a few weeks with me. Wall, Aunt Melinda had done a good many good turns by me when I wuz a girl, and then I set quite a good deal of store by Melinda Ann, she and I wuz jest about of a age, and I talked it over with Josiah, and we give our consents and writ the letter, and the next week Melinda Ann come on, bag and baggage. A leather trunk and a bag for baggage. Wall, we found Melinda Ann wuz very good dispositioned and a Christian, but hard to get along with. [Illustration: MELINDA HAS A FIT. ] The least thing we could do or say that wuz not jest so would throw her into a fit—a nervous fit you know—she would have spazzums, and all sally away, and faint like, and act. And then I would have to soothe her with catnip, and bring her up with mustard poultices, and apply a soap-stone to her. Why, one night Josiah happened to throw he bootjack down kinder hard (he had a corn and hit it, bein’ the cause). Wall, I stood over Melinda more’n two hours after that, three poultices bein’ applied in vain for relief, till arneky softened the blow to her. And one night the slats came out of the hired man’s bed, jest acrost the hall from hern, and it took more’n a quart of catnip to make her hull agin. And the cat fell through the suller winder—we have got a blind cat that acts like fury, always a fallin’ round and a prowlin’—wall, I thought Melinda Ann would never come to. She thought it wuz Injuns; and the cat did scream awful, I’ll admit; it fell onto some tin ware piled up onto a table under the winder, and it skairt even the cat almost to death, so you can imagine the condition it throwed Melinda into. I thought it wuz ghosts, and so did Josiah, and felt riz up in my mind and full of or. But I am a eppisodin’, and to resoom. Wall, I guess Melinda Ann had been there about a week, and as well as I liked Aunt Melinda, and as well as I loved duty, I wuz a beginnin’ to feel perfectly beat out and fearfully run down in my mind and depressted, for fits is depresstin’, no matter how much duty and nobility of soul you may bring to bear onto ’em, or catnip.