but somehow, I s’pose I didn’t look so chirked up and happy as he thought I ort to, and so to prove his words, and encourage me still more, he went on and told a story:

“Don’t you remember the boy that was most a fool, and when he sot out for his first party, his father charged him not to say a word, or they would find him out. He sot perfectly speechless for more’n an hour; wouldn’t answer back a word they said to him, till they begun to call him a fool right to his face. And then he opened his mouth for the first time, and hollered to his father,—‘Father! father! they’ve found me out.’”

Josiah is a great case to tell stories. He takes all the most high-toned and popular almanacs of the day, and reads ’em clear through. He says he “will read ’em, every one of ’em, from beginnin’ to Finy.” He is fond of tellin’ me anecdotes. And is also fond of tragedies—he reads the World stiddy. And I always make a practice of smilin’ or groanin’ at ’em as the case may be. (I sot out in married life with a firm determination to do my duty by this man.) But now, though I smiled a very little, there was sunthin’ in the story, or the thoughts and forebodin’s the story waked up in me, that made my heart sink from—I should judge from a careless estimate—an inch, to an inch and three-quarters. I didn’t make ixmy feelin’s known, however; puttin’ my best foot forred has been my practice for years, and my theme. And my pardner went on in a real chirk tone:

ix

“You see Samantha, jest how it is. You see there haint no kind o’ need of your writin’ any preface.”

I was almost lost in sad and mournful thought, but I answered dreamily that “I guessed I’d write one, as I had seemed to sort o’ lay out and calculate to.”

Then my companion come out plain, and told me his mind, which if he had done in the first place, would have saved breath and argument. Says he:

“I hate prefaces. I hate ’em with almost a perfect hatred.” And says he with a still more gloomy and morbid look,—“I have been hurt too much by prefaces to take to ’em, and foller ’em up.”

“Hurt by ’em?” says I.

“Yes,” says he firmly. “That other preface of your’n hurt me as much as 7 cents in the eyes of the community. It was probable more’n that damage to me. I wouldn’t”—says he, with as bitter a look onto him as I ever see,—“have had it got out that I had the Night Mair, for a silver 3 cent 

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