Says I mildly, “I thought I’d lay to and write a preface to my book, Josiah. I thought I’d tell ’em that I had wrote it all down about you and I goin’ on a tower to Filadelfy village to see the Sentinel.”

“I guess after you have wrote it all out in black ink in a book, about our goin’ to the Sentimental, folks that read it will find out we have been there, without your writin’ a preface to tell ’em of it. They will unless they are dumb fools.”

He snapped out awful snappish. I couldn’t think what ailed him, and says I firmly:

“Stop swearin’ instantly and to once, Josiah Allen!” And I added again in mild axents: “I guess I’ll lay to and write my preface, Josiah; you know there has got to be one.”

“Why has there got to be one?”

Oh! how fractious and sharp that “why” was. I never see a sharper, more worrysome “why” in my vihull life than that “why” was. But I kep’ cool, and says I in calm tones:

vi

“Because there has; Folks always have prefaces, Josiah.”

“What makes ’em have ’em? there’s the dumb of it. What makes ’em?”

Says I mekanically,—for a stiddy follerin’ of duty has made reprovin’ my pardner in times of need, a second or third nature to me—“stop swearin’ to once, Josiah Allen! They have prefaces, Josiah, because”—again I paused half a moment in deep thought—“they have ’em, because they do have ’em, that’s why.”

But even this plain and almost lucid statement didn’t seem to satisfy him, and he kep’ a arguin’ and sayin’,—“I’d be hanged if I’d have ’em,” and so on and so 4th. And I argued back again. Says I:

“You know folks are urged to publish books time and again, that wouldn’t have had no idee of doin’ it if they had been let alone.” Says I,—“You know after they git their books all finished, they hang back and hate to have ’em published; hate to, like dogs; and are urged out of their way by relatives and friends, and have to give up, and have ’em published. They naturally want to tell the Public how it is, and that these things are so.”

“Oh wall,” says he, “if the Public is any like me, he’d ruther hear the urgin’ himself than to hear the author tell on it. What did they break their backs for a writin’ fourteen or fifteen hundred pages if they 

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