Jones to furnish her
share of the perambulating schoolmaster's provisions, she remarked, "I
can eat you, but I can't sleep you, because I have no spare bedroom."
With feigned terror, I said that I feared I would not be a very
toothsome subject for a cannibal, thereupon she gave me the glad
hand, "come right in, my poor thing, and we will fat you up for our
Thanksgiving dinner." I entered, and ate my hog and doughnuts with
gladness of heart, for she was the most buxom, joyous, and hospitable
Betsy imaginable.
It was she who cheered the house and the hearth more than all the
Christmas fires, an old-fashioned, thoroughly good woman, entirely
happy without the aid of diamonds, finery, or long-tailed gowns
to trail through the mud and sweep the streets. It was extremely
refreshing to see this really sensible, natural human being, as rare
in this age as an oasis in the desert.
Her husband came in smiling, a veritable brother Jonathan, hale and
hearty, though tired, for he had arisen from bed at three o'clock
that morning, milked a dozen cows, done chores enough to kill a dozen
dapper city clerks, and then tramped beside his oxen through the deep
snow, taking a load of wood to sell in Dover nearly twenty miles away.
This load he had labored hard for two days to cut on the mountainside,
and it brought him the munificent sum of three dollars, yet he was
happier than any multi-millionaire I ever saw.
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