“You are fixed and sot up there, while I am free to soar and sail. Now, haughty female mortal, your wings are clipped--the time has come when your walkin’ afoot and roamin’ round is stopped.” To think that I myself, Josiah Allen’s Wife, should find myself on the Atlantic a-hangin’ onto the gunwale of the ship with one hand, and a-lookin’ off over the endless waters below and all round me, and a-thinkin’ if I should trust myself to step out onto its heavey, treacherous surface where should I go to, and when, and why! I, Samantha, who had ever been ust to slippin’ on my sun-bunnet and runnin’ into Miss Bobbettses, or out into the garden, or out to the hen-house for eggs, or down into the orchard, or the wood paster for recreation or cowslips. To think that I wuz thus caged up as it were, my restless wings (speakin’ in metafor) folded in such clost quarters, with no chance (to foller up the metafor) of floppin’ ’em to any extent. Oh! where wuz I? The thought wuz full of or. Why wuz I? This thought brung on trains of retrospection. As I sot in my contracted corner of the aft fore-castle deck, and Night wuz lettin’ down, gradual, her starry mantilly over me and the seen, as erst it did over me as I sot in the sweet, restful door-yard at Jonesville. (Dear seen, shall I ever see thee agin?) I will rehearse the facts that led to my takin’ this onpresidented step. My pardner is asleep in his narrer bunk, or ruther on one of the shelves in our cell, that are cushioned, and on which our two forms nightly repose. [Illustration: Asleep in his narrer bunk.] He is at rest. The waves are asleep, or pretty nigh asleep, the night winds are hushed, and all Nater seems to draw in her breath and wait for me as I tell the tale. I will begin, as most fashionable novelists do, with a verse of poetry---- “Backward, turn backward (as fur as Jonesville), Oh Time, in thy flight-- Make me (a trusty, short-winded, female historian) jest for to-night.” It wuz now goin’ on three years sence Uncle Philander Smith’s son, Philander Martin, named after his Pa and his Uncle Martin, writ a line to me announcin’ his advent into Jonesville. And in speakin’ of Philander I shall have to go back, kinder sideways, some distance into the past to describe him. Yes, I will have to lead the horse fur back to hitch it on properly to the wagon of my history, or mebby it would be more proper, under the circumstances, to say how fur I must row my little personal life-boat back to hitch it onto the great steamer of my statement, in order that there shall be direct smooth sailin’ and no meanderin’. Wall, with the first paddle of my verbal row-boat, I would state-- (And into how many little still side coves and seemin’ly wind-locked ways my little life-boat must sail on her way back to be jined to the great steamer, and how I must stay in ’em for some time! It can’t be helped.)