Oh! the agony of them several minutes, while these thoughts wuz
rampagin through my destracted brain.

Oh! if pardners only knew the agony they bring onto their devoted
companions, by their onguarded and thoughtless acts, and
attentions to other females, gin without proper reseerch and
precautions, it would draw their liniments down into expressions
of shame and remorse. Josiah wouldn't have gone with her if he
had known the number of knots she wuz a goin', no, not one step --
then why couldn't he have found out the number of them knots --
why couldn't he? Why can't pardners look ahead and see to where
their gay attentions, their flirtations that they call mild and
innercent, will lead 'em to? Why can't they realize that it haint
only themselves they are injurin', but them that are bound to 'em
by the most sacred ties that folks can be twisted up in? Why
can't they realize that a end must come to it, and it may be a
fearful and a shameful one, and if it is a happiness that stops,
it will leave in the heart when happiness gets out, a emptiness, a
holler place, where like as not onhappiness will get in, and mebby
stay there for some time, gaulin' and heart-breakin' to the
opposite pardner to see it go on?

If it is indifference, or fashion, or anything of that sort, why
it don't pay none of the time, it don't seem to me it duz, and the
end will be emptier and hollerer then the beginnin'.

In the case of my pardner it wuz fashion, nothing but the
butterfly of fashion he wuz after, to act in a high-toned,
fashionable manner, like other fashionable men. And jest see the