[Illustration: "I MYSELF DIDN'T SHED ANY TEARS."]

Once she compared single life to a lonely goose travellin' alone acrost
the country, 'cross lots, lonesome and despairin', travellin' along
over a thorny way, and desolate, weighed down by melancholy and gloomy
forebodin's, and takin' a occasional rest by standin' up on one cold
foot and puttin' its weery head under its wing, with one round eye
lookin' out for dangers that menaced it, and lookin', also, perhaps, for
a possible mate, for the comin' gander--restless, wobblin', oneasy,
miserable.

Why, she brought the school-house down, and got the audience all wrought
up with pity, and sympathy. Oh, how Submit Tewksbury did weep; she wept
aloud (she had been disappointed, but of this more bimeby).

And then she went on and compared that lonesome voyager to two blissful
wedded ones. A pair of white swans floatin' down the waveless calm,
bathed in silvery light, floatin' down a shinin' stream that wuz never
broken by rough waves, bathed in a sunshine that wuz never darkened by a
cloud.

And then she went on to bring up lots of other things to compare the two
states to--flowery things and sweet, and eloquent.

She compared single life to quantities of things, strange, weird,
melancholy things, and curius. Why, they wuz so powerful that every one
of 'em brought the school-house down.

And then she compared married life to two apple blossoms hangin'
together on one leafy bough on the perfumed June air, floatin' back and