Читать книгу My Wayward Pardner; or, My Trials with Josiah, America, the Widow Bump, and Etcetery онлайн

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“Several times sense that I have started up, and thought that I would marry anyway, and leave the result. But it has seemed to be broke up every time providential, and I’d make up my mind in the end not to have ’em. But after awhile agin I will start up, and almost make my mind up, that marry I will, no matter what the result may be. But there it is agin; I am too tender-hearted. That is where the stick is with me. I know jest how skurce men are, and how wimmen feel towards ’em. I know jest how they get their minds sot on ’em, and how they feel to loose ’em. I have got principle, Josiah Allen’s wife. I am principle clear to the back-bone.”

“Wall,” says I, “I don’t know but you be. I can’t dispute you, not knowin’ how it is.”

“It may end,” says he, with a bitter look at the woman over the wood-box, “it may end by my not marryin’ at all. But if I don’t marry, where will the blame lie?”

Says he, speakin’ up louder and more excited than he had spoke up:

“I have been blamed; blamed in public places; right in the grocery, and on the post-office steps; blamed by the trustees of the public school; blamed by the old man that keeps the children’s toy-store; blamed by the census man for shiftlessness, and slackness, in not increasin’ the population.