“Three weeks after his wife’s death!” says I.
“Yes,” says she, “Solomon said the corpse wouldn’t be no deader than she was then, if he waited three months, as some men did.” Says she, “The way on’t was, I was a praisin’ up his horse and wagon—a new double wagon with a spring seat—when all of a sudden he spoke out in a real ardent and lover like tone: ‘Widder Doodle, if you will be my bride, the wagon is yourn, and the mares.’ Says he, ‘Widder, I throw myself onto your feet, and I throw the wagon and mares onto ’em; and with them and me, I throw eighty-five acres of good land, fourteen cows, five calves, four three year olds and a yearlin’, a dwellin’ house, a good horse barn, and myself. I throw ’em all onto your feet, and there we lay on ’em.’
“He waited for me to answer and it flustrated me so that I says: ‘Oh Doodle! Doodle! if you was alive you would tell me what to do, to do right.’” “And that,” says she, “seemed to mad him; he looked black and hard as a stove pipe, his forward all wrinkled up, and he yelled out that he didn’t want to hear nothin’ about no Doodle nor he wouldn’t neither.” Says she, “He hollered it up so, and looked so threatnin’ that I took out my snuff handkerchief and cried onto it, and he said he’d overlook Doodle for once, and then he said again in a kind of a solemn and warnin’ way: ‘Widder I am a layin’ on your feet, and my property, my land, my live stock, my housen, and my housen stuff, are all a layin’ on ’em; make up your mind, and at once, for if you don’t consent I have got other views ahead on me, which must be seen to at once, and instantly. Time is hastenin’, and the world is full of willin’ wimmen, Widder, what do you say?’
“And then,” says she, “I kinder consented, and he said we’d be married and he’d turn off his hired girl, and I could go right there and do the housework, and help him what I could out doors, and tend to the milk of fourteen cows, and be perfectly happy. He thought,” says she, “as he was hurried with his summer’s work, we had better be married on Sunday, so’s not to break into the week’s work; so we was.”
Says I, “Be you perfectly happy, Widder?”
When I asked her this in sympathizin tones, she took her snuff handkerchief right out, and bust out a cryin’ onto it, and said she wasn’t.