You see she had to do every mite of her housework, and milk cows, and make butter and cheese, and cook and wash and scour, and take all the care of the children day and night in sickness and health, and make their clothes and keep ’em clean. And when there wuz so many of ’em and she enjoyin’ real poor health, I spoze she sometimes thought more of her own achin’ back than she did of the good of the Govermunt—and she would git kinder discouraged sometimes and be cross to him. And knowin’ his own motives wuz so high and loyal, he felt that he ort to whip her, so he did. And what shows that Drusilly wuzn’t so bad after all and did have her good streaks and a deep reverence for the law is, that she stood his whippin’s first-rate, and never whipped him. Now she wuz fur bigger than he wuz, weighed eighty pounds the most, and might have whipped him if the law had been such. But they wuz both law-abidin’ and wanted to keep every preamble, so she stood it to be whipped, and never once whipped him in all the seventeen years they lived together. She died when her twelfth child wuz born. There wuz jest ten months difference between that and the one next older. And they said she often spoke out in her last sickness, and said, “Thank fortune, I’ve always kep’ the law!” And they said the same thought wuz a great comfort to him in his last moments. He died about a year after she did, leavin’ his second wife with twins and a good property. Then there wuz Abagail Pester. She married a sort of a high-headed man, though one that paid his debts, wuz truthful, good lookin’, and played well on the fiddle. Why, it seemed as if he had almost every qualification for makin’ a woman happy, only he had this one little eccentricity, he would lock up Abagail’s clothes every time he got mad at her. Of course the law give her clothes to him, and knowin’ that it wuz the law in the state where they lived, she wouldn’t have complained only when they had company. But it wuz mortifyin’, nobody could dispute it, to have company come and have nothin’ to put on. Several times she had to withdraw into the woodhouse, and stay most all day there shiverin’, and under the suller stairs and round in clothes presses. But he boasted in prayer meetin’s and on boxes before grocery stores that he wuz a law-abidin’ citizen, and he wuz. Eben Flanders wouldn’t lie for anybody.