If you will believe it, it run along as much as 2 or 3 weeks and no book sent home; and one night, when Josiah and I was a-settin’ there alone—the children was out to one of the neighbors’—I jest broke out, and sez I: “It is a shameful piece of business, and I won’t stan’ it.” “What is the matter?” sez Josiah, layin’ down his new paper. “Miss Gowdey is the matter! My magazine is the matter,” sez I. “There she has kep’ it ’most 3 weeks, and she knew I hadn’t read a word in it,” sez I. “It is a burnin’ shame.” “Wal, what made you let it go?” sez he. “Deacon Gowdey is worth 3 times as much as I be. Why don’t they take their own magazines? What made you let ’em have it?” The next day, after I done up my mornin’s work, I went down to Deacon Gowdey’s; I wanted to know about my magazine. There wasn’t anybody in the settin’-room, when I went in, but Johnny; he was settin’ on the floor, playin’ with some pictures. Sez I: “Where is your ma, Johnny?” Sez he: “She’s in the kitchen, huskin’ some beans fer dinner; but see what I’ve got, Aunt Allen,” and he come up in front of me, with the picture of a woman cut out of a book. As he come up close to me, and held it up in front of me by the head, I knew it in a minute; it come out of my magazine—it was the very handsomest figger in the fashion plate. For a minute, I was speechless; but these thoughts raged tumultuously through my brain: “If the child is father to the man, as I heard Thomas Jefferson readin’ about, here is a parent that I would like to have the care of fer a short time.” At this crisis in my thoughts, he spoke up agin: “I am goin’ to cut her petticoats down into pantaloons, and paint some whiskers on her face and make a pirate of her.” Then the feelin’s I had long curbed broke forth, and I said to him in awful tones: “You will be a pirate yourself, young man, if you keep on—a bloody pirate on the high seas,” sez I. “What do you mean by tearin’ folks’es books to pieces in this way?” Just at this minute, Miss Gowdey came in, and heerd my last words. She jest said: “How d’ye do?” to me, and then she went at Johnny: “You awful child, you! How dare you touch that book? How dare you unlock the parlor-door, and climb up on the best table, and take the clean paper off of it, or handle it? How dare you, John Wesley?” “You give it to me yourself, ma; you know you did, last night, when the minister was here. You said, if I wouldn’t tease fer any more honey, you’d lem’me take it. And can’t I have some honey now? Say, ma, can’t you gim’me some?”