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The doctor drew his buggy nearer. He was a little deaf. "No; I said this pill, doctor. I'm a-holdin' of it here in the pa'm o' my hand, a-studyin' over it." "What's she a-dosin' you for now, Enoch?" The doctor always called the deacon by his first name when he approached him in sympathy. He did not know it. Neither did the deacon, but he felt the sympathy, and it unlocked the portals of his heart.
"Shucks!" cried Absalom, unfilially; "ye'd aheap better be a-studyin' 'bout'n my good now 'n whenst I war a baby a-givin' away my child ter them Quimbeys; a-h'istin' him out'n the winder!" She was glad to retort that he was "impident," and to take refuge in an aggrieved silence, as many another mother has done when outmatched by logic.
In this department of woods lore, Bill was so deeply ignorant that, not caring to lean too heavily on his imagination, lest it should break and stick into him, he used to avoid it quite obstinately. He would say "Them youngsters is all alike, anyhow, an' it ain't worth while to waste no time a-studyin' 'em!" So here Uncle Andy had the field all to himself.
Then he resumed didactically, but with some irrelevancy, "I tole ye t'other day ez how ye war old enough ter be a-studyin' 'bout gittin' married." "They don't think nothin' of ye ter our house, Jacob. Dad 's always a-jowin' at ye." Cynthia's candor certainly could not be called in question.
Drusilla said she could always tell where to find him "a-studyin' them tin clothes." One sunshiny day they decided to visit the Doane home. John did not want to go where there were so many women, but Drusilla insisted. "I want 'em to see a man, John. They're shet up all day with nothin' but women, and they're tired of seein' 'em." "But I'm an old man, Drusilla."
The young seal was an endless source of speculation to her. "To think, now," she would mutter to herself, "that I'd be a-settin' here day after day a-studyin' out a critter like that, what's no more'n jest plain fish says I, if he do flop roun' the house an' drink milk like a cat. He's right uncanny; but there ain't no denyin' but what he's as good as a circus when he gits to playin' with Toby."
But I drawed him back, and sez I, "If you've got to be killed here, Josiah Allen, I don't want you killed by a Arab." And he sez, "I d'no but I'd jest as lieves be killed by a Arab as a Turkey. "But," sez he, "you tend to yourself, and I'll tend to myself. I wuz jest a-studyin' human nater, Samantha." And that wuz all the thanks I got for rescuin' him.
The dog stretched himself in the sunshine. The old man sat with bent head "a-studyin'," then nodded, then fell into a deep sleep, soothed by the silence, which reigned unbroken save for the distant cawing of a crow. The long gray moss swayed dreamily upon the motionless boughs of the giant trees.
It was growing very slender now. Cynthia's serious face relaxed its gravity. "Ye air foolish, Jacob," she said, laughing. After stringing on another pepper-pod with great deliberation, she continued: "Ef I war a-studyin' 'bout a-gittin' married, thar ain't nobody round 'bout hyar ez I'd hev." And she added another pod to the flaming red string, so bright against the yellow of her dress.
I been a-drivin' this heah hack and a-studyin' of history for more'n forty years, and I ain't hardly scratch the skin of what done happen heah before a Yankee man was ever thought of. They didn't use to have no Yankees 'fore the war, but they done propogate themselves so all over the land that they clean got possession of 'most all of it.