Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/227

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in her heart that is beyend reason, as fur above and beyend it as the stars are above the earth."

"If you did your duty, Josiah Allen's wife, you would tell her to obey her mother and marry the man her mother approves of, that her mother's superior wisdom and experience teaches her is the best fitted to insure her child's happiness."

"No, Tamer Ann Smith, I make no matches nor break none, and if I wuz goin' to advise Anna, which I hain't, I shouldn't be liable to advise her to give up all the beauty and romance and happiness of life for the sake of settin' down under the shade of a family tree and let it shade me alongside that walkin' mummy, Von Crank."

"One of the oldest and most aristocratick families in the State. You ought to take it as a great honor that he felt willin' to connect himself with the Smith family at all."

I see we couldn't agree, and I sez, "Tamer Ann, you will agitate yourself so your baslar mangetis will be worse—man-get-us," sez I thoughtfully; "if that wuz only a contagious disease I know lots of single wimmen who would love to have it prevail." But my friendly joke didn't turn her mind round as I meant it should; no, she went on bitterly:

"To think Tom Willis should think of marryin' Anna, and his father only a common carpenter."

"Well, Tamer Ann," sez I, "we kneel every day of our life and worship One who wuz called that.

"Tom Willis," sez I, "has got the wealth and distinction in himself instead of havin' to put on a pair of magnifyin' specks and try to trace it back to some remote ancestor, who mebby had a spark or two of it. You'll find it right here in him, and I think it is better