“Well, I couldn’t stand up, and there the barn doors was open yit, and I was so stiff and lame, and froze, it seemed to me I couldn’t move at all. But I sat down, and begins to rub my hands to get ’em to their feelin’, so I could use ’em, and then my legs, and then my other parts, and my back I couldn’t move, for ’twas as stiff as a board, and I couldn’t turn without turnin’ my whole body; and I should think I was in that situation all of an hour, afore I could git my clothes on.
“At last I got my shirt on, and it stuck fast to my back, and then my t’other clothes on, and then I gits up and shuts the barn doors, and waddles off to the house; and he sees me a comin’, and hollers out ‘nigger, go and do your chores, and off to the woods.’
“Well, I waddled round, and did my chores as well as I could, and then takes my axe and waddles off to the woods, through a deep snow. I gits there, and cuts down a large rock oak tree, and a good while I was ’bout it, tu, and my shirt still stuck fast to my back. I off with one eight foot cut, and then flung my axe down on the ground, and swore I’d _die_ afore I cut another chip out of that log that day; and I gets down and clears away the snow on the sunny side of the log, and sets down on the leaves, and a part of the time I sighed, and a part of the time I cried, and a part of the time I swore, and wished myself dead fifty times.
“Well, settin’ there I looked up and to my surprise I see a woman comin’ towards me; and come to, it turned out to be my old friend ‘Lecta, and the first thing she says, when she comes up was, ‘ain’t you _most dead_, Peter?’ ‘Yis, and I wish I was _quite_, Miss ‘Lecta;’ and she cries and I cries, and she sets down on the log and says, ‘Peter, ain’t you hungry? here’s some victuals for you;’ and she had some warm coffee in a coffee-pot, and some fried meat, and some bread, and pie, and cheese, and nut-cakes; and says she to me, ‘Peter, eat it _all_ up if you can.’
A. “Why! Peter what would become of the world, if it warn’t, for the women?”
P. “Why, Sir, they’d _eat each other up_, and what they didn’t _eat_, they’d _kill_. Then they keep the men back from doin’ a great many ferocious things. Why, only ‘tother day when that duel was fit in Washington, between Graves and Cilley, the papers say that Mrs. Graves, when she found out that the duel was a comin’ on, tried to stop her husband, but he wouldn’t hear to her, and so he went on, and killed poor Cilley, and made his wife a widder, and his children orphans. Now, only think how much misery would have been spared, if he’d only heard to his wife.