A. “Well, Peter, you were going to talk about holydays, and I shouldn’t think it much of a holyday to be ‘tuned with them sprouts.’”
P. “Oh! yis, Sir, we had great times every Christmas and New-Years; but we thought the most of Sain’t Valentine’s Day. The boys and gals of the whole neighborhood, used to git together, and carry on, and make fun, and _sich like_. We used to play pin a good deal, and I and John used to go snacks, and cheat like Sancho Panza; and there’s where we got the pins to stick in the calf’s nose, I was tellin’ you on. We used to have a good deal of _fun_ sometimes in _bilein eggs_. Mistress would send us out to hunt eggs, and we’d find a nest of a dozen, likely, and only carry in three or four, and lay the rest by for holydays. Well, we used to bile eggs, as I was sayin’, and the boys would strike biled eggs together, and the one that didn’t get his egg broke should have t’other’s, for his’n was the best egg. Well, we got a contrivance, I and John did, that brought us a fine bunch of eggs. John’s uncle was down the country once, and he gin John a smooth marble egg: oh! ’twas a dreadful funny thing, and I guess he’s got it yit, if he’s a livin’—well, we kept this egg, year in, and year out, and we’d take it to the holydays, and break all the eggs there, and carry home a nice parcel, and have a good bunch to give away, and I guess as how the boys never found it out.”
A. “Why, you had as good times as you could ask for, it seems to me.”
P. “Oh! yis, Sir, I see many bright days, and, when I was a boy, I guess no feller had more fun than I did. And I mean, Domine, all through the book, to tell things jist as they was, and when I was frolicsome and happy I’ll say so, and when I was in distress, I’ll say so; for it seems to me, a book ought to tell things jist as they be. Well, I had got about to the end of my happy fun, for mistress, who was the best friend I had, was took sick, and I expected her to die—and sure ’nough she did die; and as I was kind ‘a superstitious, one night afore she died, I heard some strange noises, that scart me, and made me think ’em forerunners of mistress’ death; and for years and years them noises used to trouble me distressedly. Well, mistress had been a good woman, and died _like a christian_. When she thought she was a dyin’, she called up her husband to her bed-side, and took him by the hand, and says, ‘I am now goin’ to my God, and your God, and I want you to prepare to follow me to heaven,’ and says ‘farewell;’ she puts her arms round his neck and kisses him. Then she calls up her children, and says pretty much the same thing to them; and then me, and she puts her arms round all our necks, and kisses us all, and says ‘good bye dear children,’ and she fell back into the bed and died, without a struggle or a groan.