The Voice of the People

ir upon the clothesline at the back of the house, while pungent odours of tar and camphor were exhaled from the full black folds. On thes

frock and the leather case of a daguerreotype containing the picture of a round-eyed girl with rosy cheeks. Aunt Griselda had hidden them hastily away at the child's entran

ad tossed them carelessly into the cedar chest and gone out to forget them. Her heart had not been deeply touched and it soon mended. No other lovers came, and she lived her quiet life in her father's house, gathering garden flowers for the great, blue bowls in the parlour, teaching the catechism to small black slaves, and making stiff, old-fashioned samplers in crewels. The high-spirited lo

ered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone. Her spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to fancied wrongs. In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and implacable hate in a thoughtless jest. Her bitterness and her years waxed greater together, and s

ly to her lean old breast, but he had broken into peevish cries and st

pushed him into the hall with sharp, scolding words, and had sat d

ry eyes. Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like aromas in a heart too aged for passion were liberated by the bundle of yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust. As she sat in her stiff bombazine skirts beside

ce. Outwardly she grew more soured and more eccentric. On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her head wrapped in a pink knitted "nubia," and strol

xercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish ones, but there was grim pathos

Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to lose herself suddenly at ni

bow and look out across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold. The song of a mocking-bird in th

Aunt Chris would turn upon her pil

stle closer to her sweet, white pillow. With the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris. First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would

s." And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the Battle fortunes, wou

procession then filed out to the space before the hen-house, the door of which was flung back, while Aunt Verbeny clucked at a little distance. Miss Chris scattered her dough upon the ground and, while her un

the indifference of an abstract deity. "Is it fat? And the

of the fiat she turned to inspect the bunch

e drooping chickens in each hand, their legs tied together with strips

judgments, he came forward and proffere

tones, while Aunt Verbeny gave a suspicious poke beneath one

tammered c

e returned, blushing as Aunt Verbeny grunted agai

dded shamefacedly: "Won't you please let that red-an

ed Miss Chris, "I believe the

burst into tears and declared

t be killed, Aunt Chris. It shall go in my hen-h-ou-se." And she

vestments of golden-rod and sumach. In the centre of the waste, standing alike grim and majestic at all seasons, there was the charred skeleton of a gigantic tree, which had been stripped naked by a bolt of lightning long years ago. At its foot a prickly clump of briars surrounded the blackened trunk in a decoration of green or red, and from thi

ling in the breeze like white-capped billows on a sunlit sea. From the avenue to his father's land the road was unbroken by a single shadow-on

oke from the white streak of the road,

saw his stepmother taking the clothes in from the bushes where they had been spread to dry. It was Saturday, and ironing day, and he hoped for a chance at his lessons before night came, when he was so

r saw him she c

did they take

the weeds in the garden, gave

more, I 'spose? Did you tell 'em I wa

is head. No, he

eanut field. You'd better get a drink

e trees. The judge had given him a biography of Jefferson, and he had learned his hero's life with lips

the church," h

ith a love for children, turned to him i

d," he replied, "to be

set much store by that. But I've got to go to heave

is generation, for he left the great man's ow

r we shall see, my

the street his name was called by Juliet Burwell, and she fluttered

ld me that you wanted to be confirmed-and I w

ical drawl of her speech soothed him like the running of clear water. He felt the image of Thomas Jefferson totter upo

oft voice, and he stammered