“How do you mean?” asked Layton, eagerly.
“I mean,” said the other, resolutely, “we treat 'em as reasonable beings, and they ain't. No, sir, women is like Red-men; they ain't to be persuaded, or argued with; they 're to be told what is right for 'em, and good for 'em, and that's all. What does all your courting and coaxing a gal, but make her think herself something better than all creation? Why, you keep a-tellin' her so all day, and she begins to believe it at last. Now, how much better and fairer to say to her, 'Here's how it is, miss, you 've got to marry me, that's how it's fixed.' She 'll understand that.”
“No, no,” said Quackinboss, with a half-bitter smile, “she 'll never say that to the man as knows how to tell her his mind. And as for that courtship, it's all a mistake. Why, women won't confess they like a man, just to keep the game a-movin'. I'm blest if they don't like it better than marriage.”
Layton gave a faint smile, but, faint as it was, Quackinboss perceived it, and said,--
“Now, don't you go a-persuadin' yourself these are all Yankee notions and such-like. I'm a-talkin' of human natur', and there ain't many as knows more of that article than Leonidas Shaver Quackinboss. All you Old-World folk make one great mistake, and nothing shows so clearly as how you 're a worn-out race, used up and done for. You live too much with your emotions and your feelin's. Have you never remarked that when the tap-root of a tree strikes down too far, it gets into a cold soil? And from that day for'ard you 'll never see fruit or blossom more. That's just the very thing you 're a-doin'. You ain't satisfied to be active and thrivin' and healthful, but you must go a-specu-latin' about why you are this, and why you ain't t' other. Get work to do, sir, and do it.”
“It is what I intend,” said Layton, in a low voice.
“There ain't nothing like labor,” said Quackinboss, with energy; “work keeps the devil out of a man's mind, for somehow there's nothing that black fellow loves like loafing. And whenever I see a great, tall, well- whiskered chap leaning over a balcony in a grand silk dressing-gown, with a gold stitched cap on his head, and he a-yawning, I say to myself, 'Maybe I don't know _who 's_ at your elbow now;' and when I see one of our strapping Western fellows, as he has given the last stroke of his hatchet to a pine-tree, and stands back to let it fall, wiping the honest sweat from his brow, as his eyes turn upward over the tree-tops to something higher than them, I say to my heart, 'All right, there; he knows who it was gave him the strength to lay that sixty-foot stem so low.'”
