If anybody had told me when I was first born that I would marry to a widower, I should have been mad at ’em. I lived up to this idee quite a number of years, how many, is nobody’s business, that I will contend for. I laughed at the idee of love in my blindness of eye. But the first minute I sot my grey eye onto Josiah Allen I knew my fate. My heart was a pray to feelin’s it had heretofore been a stranger to.

Sez I to myself “Is this love?” I couldn’t answer, I was too agitated.

Josiah told me afterwards that he felt jest exactly the same, only, when his heart wildly put the question to him, “Is it love you feel for Samantha Smith?” he havin’ experience in the same, answered, “Yes, it is love.”

I married Josiah Allen (in mother’s parlor, on the fourteenth day of June, in a bran new silk dress with a long boddis waist) from pure love. Though why I loved him, I know not. I looked at his mild face beamin’ on me from above his black silk stock, which kep’ his head kinder stiff, and asked myself this question, “Why do you love him?” I reckolected then, and I have recalled it to his mind several times sense in our little differences of opinion, which occur in the happiest families—that I had had offers from men, handsomer than him, with more intelect than him, with more riches than him, with less children than him. Why didn’t I love these various men? I knew not. I can only repeat in the immortal and almost deathless lines of the poet, “Love will go where it is sent.”

Yes, Josiah Allen was my fate, and when I laid my light silk glove in his’en (they was almost of a color, a kind of cinnemen broun) before the alter, or that is before Elder Wesley Minkley, I did it with the purest and tenderest emotions of love.

And that love has been like a Becon in our pathway ever sense. Its pure light, though it has sputtered some, and in tryin’ times such as washin’ days and cleanin’ house times has burnt down pretty low,—has never gone out.

When I married him the bald spot on his head wuzn’t much bigger than a new silver dollar. Now the top of his head is as smooth and clean as one of my stun china dinner plates, and if any horse jocky was to try to judge of his age by lookin’ at his teeth, they would be baffled, not but what he has got some teeth, but they are pretty scatterin’. But still that Becon shines, that pure love triumphs over lost teeth and vanished sandy hair. There haint a man on the face of the earth that looks so good to me as Josiah Allen. I don’t tell him this, mind you, 14 years experience of married life has taught me caution. Josiah is as good as they’ll average generally, but no man can’t stand too much flattery, men are naturally vain.

As I said in the commencement of this plain and unvarnished history, I had almost a deadly objection to widowers owin’ to their habit of comparin’ their second wives to their first relict, to the disadvantage of the first-named pardner. Josiah tride it with me when we was first married. But I didn’t encourage him in it. He began on several various times, “It seems to me Samantha that Polly Ann used to fry up her meat a little cripsier,” or “It seems as if Polly Ann used to make my collers a little stiffer.” He stopped it before we had been married a year, for I didn’t encourage it in him.

As I mean that this book shall be a Becon light, guidin’ female wimmen, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of true happiness, I would insert right here this word of solem’ warnin’ to my sect situated in the tryin’ place of second consorts, if the relict goes to comparin’ you to his foregone consort, don’t encourage him in it. On this short rule hangs the hope of domestick harmony.