Page:Samantha on Children's Rights.djvu/222

 went to applyin' it to her heated and red visage as she went on with her remarks.

"It wuz that very summer, they wuz paintin' the roof of the Presbyterian Church a bright red, and Jack and Eddie went over there while the men had gone home to their dinner, and they painted each other a bright red all over, their hair and faces and hands and legs all a bright solid red, and on their clothes they put the paint in stripes. No human objects outside of a menagerie ever looked as they did as they marched home through the streets. I would love to hear you say, Samantha, that you ever see Hamen or me cuttin' up such tricks."

"Not exactly," sez I, lookin' pensively at her paint box, "but I don't spoze the little creeters knew how dretfully they would look or how oncomfortable and sticky they would make themselves or their parents."

"Well, I know Jack got a good whippin' for that scrape after we had scoured him off with turpentine so we could whip him."

"Well," sez I, sithin' deep, "there is lots of things that we have to learn by experience, Tamer Ann, lots of experiments we try with our hearts, our lives, our feller creeters' happiness and our own. We dip the brush in carelessly that is to leave its mark on us for life, that no turpentine can wash out, recklessly, onheedingly, blindly, we make the fatal marks, blot out the hull of happiness mebby, with the wretched fatality of ignorance. And we git whipped for it," sez I, "whipped by the achin' pain in our hearts, by the more stingin' pain of seein' some one we love suffer, that we have laid the fatal brush on with our own hands. We are all blind creeters; we are all poor, ignorant children sot down in a new world and another mysterious one in front of us,