But I say I had loved your mother true, Johnny, and she had loved me true, for more than fifteen years; and I loved her more the fifteenth year than I did the first, and we couldn’t have got along without each other, any more than you could get along if somebody cut your heart right out.  We had laughed together and cried together; we had been sick, and we’d been well together; we’d had our hard times and our pleasant times right along, side by side; we’d baptized the babies, and we’d buried ’m, holding on to each other’s hand; we had grown along year after year, through ups and downs and downs and ups, just like one person, and there wasn’t any more dividing of us.  But for all that we’d been put out, and we’d had our two ways, and we had spoken our sharp words like any other two folks, and this wasn’t our first quarrel by any means.

I tell you, Johnny, young folks they start in life with very pretty ideas,—­very pretty.  But take it as a general thing, they don’t know any more what they’re talking about than they do about each other, and they don’t know any more about each other than they do about the man in the moon.  They begin very nice, with their new carpets and teaspoons, and a little mending to do, and coming home early evenings to talk; but by and by the shine wears off.  Then come the babies, and worry and wear and temper.  About that time they begin to be a little acquainted, and to find out that there are two wills and two sets of habits to be fitted somehow.  It takes them anywhere along from one year to three to get jostled down together.  As for smoothing off, there’s more or less of that to be done always.

Well, I didn’t sleep very well that night, dropping into naps and waking up.  The baby was worrying over his teeth every half-hour, and Nancy getting up to walk him off to sleep in her arms,—­it was the only way you would be hushed up, and you’d lie and yell till somebody did it.

Now, it wasn’t many times since we’d been married that I had let her do that thing all night long.  I used to have a way of getting up to take my turn, and sending her off to sleep.  It isn’t a man’s business, some folks say.  I don’t know anything about that; maybe, if I’d been broiling my brain in book learning all day till come night, and I was hard put to it to get my sleep anyhow, like the parson there, it wouldn’t; but all I know is, what if I had been breaking my back in the potato-patch since morning? so she’d broken her’s over the oven; and what if I did need nine hours’ sound sleep?  I could chop and saw without it next day, just as well as she could do the ironing, to say nothing of my being a great stout fellow,—­there wasn’t a chap for ten miles round with my muscle,—­and she with those blue veins on her forehead.  Howsomever that may be, I wasn’t used to letting her do it by herself, and so I lay with my eyes shut, and pretended that I was asleep; for I didn’t feel like giving in, and speaking up gentle, not about that nor anything else.