needn't worry about Race Suicide, for you might as well try to stop a hen
from makin' a nest, as to stop wimmen from wantin' a baby to love and hold
on her heart. But sez I, "Folks ort to be moderate and mejum in babies as
well as in everything else."

But Drusilly's husband wanted twelve boys he said, to be law-abidin'
citizens as their Pa wuz, and a protection to the Govermunt, and to be
ready to man the new warships, if a war broke out. But her babies wuz
real pretty and cunning, and she wuz so weak-minded she couldn't enjoy
the thought that if our male statesmen got to scrappin' with some other
nation's male law-makers and made another war, of havin' her grown-up
babies face the cannons. I spoze it wuz when she wuz so awful tired she
felt so.

You see she had to do every mite of her housework, and milk cows, and make
butter and cheese, and cook and wash and scour, and take all the care of
the children day and night in sickness and health, and make their clothes
and keep 'em clean. And when there wuz so many of 'em and she enjoyin' real
poor health, I spoze she sometimes thought more of her own achin' back than
she did of the good of the Govermunt--and she would git kinder discouraged
sometimes and be cross to him. And knowin' his own motives wuz so high and
loyal, he felt that he ort to whip her, so he did.

And what shows that Drusilly wuzn't so bad after all and did have her good
streaks and a deep reverence for the law is, that she stood his whippin's
first-rate, and never whipped him. Now she wuz fur bigger than he wuz,
weighed eighty pounds the most, and might have whipped him if the law had
been such. But they wuz both law-abidin' and wanted to keep every preamble,
so she stood it to be whipped, and never once whipped him in all the
seventeen years they lived together. She died when her twelfth child wuz