“Oh shaw!” And I see, devoted Christian as John Richard wuz, the words gaulded him almost more than he could endure, and he broke out in almost heated axents, and his keen dark eye a flashin’, and says he: “I tell you the storm is brewing! I have watched it coming up and spreading over the land, and unless it is averted, destruction awaits this people.” His tone wuz a very preachin’ one, very, and I felt considerable impressed by it; but Josiah Allen spoke up pert as a peacock, and sez he: “Why don’t the Southern folks behave themselves, then?” And sez John Richard: “Do you blame the Southern white folks exclusively?” “Yes,” sez Josiah, in them same pert axents; “yes, of course I do.” “Then that shows how short-sighted you are, how blind!” “I can see as well as you can!” sez Josiah, all wrought up—“I don’t have to wear goggles.” Oh, how mortified, how mortified I felt! John Richard did wear blue goggles when he wuz travellin’. But what a breach of manners to twit a visiter of such a thing! Twit ’em of goggles, blue ones too! I felt as if I should sink. But I didn’t know Cousin John Richard Allen. He hadn’t give up ease and comfort and the joys of a fireside, for principle’s sake, for nuthin’. No personal allusions could touch him. The goggles fell onto him harmlessly, and fell off agin. He didn’t notice ’em no more’n if they hadn’t been throwed. And he went on growin’ more and more sort o’ lifted up and inspired-lookin’, and a not mindin’ what or who wuz round him. And sez he: “I tell you again the storm is rising; I hear its mutterings in the distance, and it is coming nearer and nearer all the time.” Josiah kinder craned his neck and looked out of the winder in a sort of a brisk way. He misunderstood him a purpose, and acted as if John Richard meant a common thunder-storm. But Cousin John Richard never minded him, bein’ took up and intent on what his own mind wuz a lookin’ at onbeknown to us— “I have been amongst this people night and day for years; I have been in the mansions of the rich, the ruins of the beautiful homes ruined by the war, and in the cabins of the poor. I have been in their schools and their churches, and the halls where the law is misadministered—I have been through the Southern land from one end to the other—and I know what I am talking about. “I went there to try to help the freedmen. I knew these people so lately enslaved were poor and ignorant, and I thought I could help them. “But I was almost as ignorant as you are of the real state of affairs in the South. But I have been there and seen for myself, and I tell you, and I tell this nation, that we are on the eve of another war if something is not done to avert it.” My pardner wuz jest a openin’ his mouth in a derisive remark, but I hitched my chair along and trod on his foot, and onbeknown to me it wuz the foot on which he wuz raisin’ a large corn, and his derisive remark wuz changed to a low groan, and Cousin John Richard went on onhendered.