I don't believe either one of us
thought about it till Sunday mornin' come. I ricollect it jest like it
was yesterday. We was married in June, and you know how things always
look about then. I've thought many a day, when I've been out in the
gyarden workin' with my vegetables and getherin' my honeysuckles and
roses, that if folks could jest live on and never git old and it'd
stay June forever, that this world'd be heaven enough for anybody. And
that's the way it was that Sunday mornin'. I ricollect I had on my
'second-day' dress, the prettiest sort of a changeable silk, kind 'o
dove color and pink, and I had a leghorn bonnet on with pink roses
inside the brim, and black lace mitts on my hands. I stood up before
the glass jest before I went out to the gate where Abram was, waitin'
for me, and I looked as pretty as a pink, if I do say it. 'Self-praise
goes but a little ways,' my mother used to tell me, when I was a
gyirl; but I reckon there ain't any harm in an old woman like me
tellin' how she looked when she was a bride more'n sixty years ago."

And a faint color came into the wrinkled cheeks, while her clear, high
laugh rang out. The outward symbols of youth and beauty were gone, but
their unquenchable spirit lay warm under the ashes of nearly eight
decades.

"Well, I went out, and Abram helped me into the buggy and, instead o'
goin' straight on to Goshen church, he turned around and drove out to
my church. When we walked in I could see folks nudgin' each other and
laughin', and when meetin' broke and we was fixin' to go home, Aunt
Maria Taylor grabbed hold o' me and pulled me off to one side and says
she, 'That's right, Jane, you're beginnin' in time. Jest break a man
in at the start, and you won't have no trouble afterwards.' And I jest
laughed in her face and went on to where Abram was waitin' for me. I
was too happy to git mad that day. Well, the next Sunday, when we got
into the buggy and Abram started to turn round, I took hold o' the
reins and says I, 'It's my time to drive, Abram; you had your way last
Sunday, and now I'm goin' to have mine.' And I snapped the whip over
old Nell's back and drove right on to Goshen, and Abram jest set back
and laughed fit to kill.

"We went on that way for two or three months, folks sayin' that Abram
and Jane Parrish couldn't go to the same church two Sundays straight
along to save their lives, and everybody wonderin' which of us'd have
their way in the long run. And me and A