Alzina Ann looked like a white holley hawk, that had been withered by an untimely frost. But Sylphina looked tickled (she hadn’t forgot her sufferens, and the sufferens of Nathen Spooner). And my Josiah looked proud and triumphant in mean. And he told me, in confidence, a-going home, “that he hadn’t seen me look so good to him, as I did when I stood there in the winder, not for upwards of thirteen years.” Says he: “Samantha, you looked, you did, almost perfectly beautiful.” That man worships the ground I walk on, and I do his’n. THE WIDDER DOODLE AS A COMFERTER. Nancy Cypher is dead. Yes, Solomon has lost his wife with the typus. She was a likely wemen, had a swelled neck, but that wusn’t nothin’ aginst her, I never laid it up against her for a moment. I told Thomas Jefferson, when he brought me the news, that I wished “he and I was as likely a wemen as she was,” for it came sudden onto me, and I wanted to praise her up. And, says I, still more warmly, “If the hull world was as likely a woman as she was, there wouldn’t be so much cuttin’ up and actin’, as there is now. And,” says I, “Thomas Jefferson, it stands us on hand to be prepared.” But sometimes, I get almost discouraged with that boy. I can’t solemnize him down, and get him to take a realizin’ sense of things. His morals are as sound as brass. But he has, a good deal of the time, a light and triflin’ demeanor, and his mind don’t seem so sound and stabled as I could wish it to be. I don’t s’pose anybody would believe me, but the very day after that boy told me of Nancy Cypher’s death, that boy began to poke his aunt Doodle about the relict. I told him I never see nothin’, in my hull life, so wicked and awful, and I asked him, where he s’posed “he’d go to?” He was fixin’ on a paper collar, to the lookin’-glass, and he says, in a kind of cherk, genteel way, and with a polite tone. “I s’pose I shall go to the weddin’.” You might jist as well exhort the winds to stop blowin’ when it is out on a regular spree, as to stop him when he gets to behavin’. But I guess he got the worst of it in this affair. I guess his aunt Doodle skeert him, she took on so, when he segested the idea of her marryin’ to another man. She bust right out a cryin’, took her handkerchief out, and rubbed both her eyes with both hands, her elbows standin’ out most straight. She took on awful. “Oh, Doodle! Doodle!” says she. “What if you had lived to hear your relict laughed at about marryin’ to another man. Oh! what agony it would have brought to your dear linements. Oh! I can’t bear it, I can’t. Oh! when I think of that dear man, how he worshipped the ground I walked on, and the neighbors said he did, they said he thought more of the ground, than he did of me; but he didn’t, he worshipped us both; and what his feelings be, if he had lived, to hear his widder laughed at about another man?”