Of course I would:  why should I object to doing anything that would forward my husband’s interests?  Besides, I was actually pining for some healthful occupation:  I was tired of playing at living.  I resolved on a brilliant plan.  I would out-mother mother, for she only saw to the making of the sacks:  I would make them myself, every one of them, on my sewing-machine.  If I couldn’t make cotton-sacks on it, what was the use of having it?

Charlie had informed me that he would send me down seven or eight women from the quarters to make the sacks.  I informed him with a flourish that I should need but one:  I should want her to cut the sacks out.  Charlie thanked me, and Martha and I and “Wheeler & Wilson” made the sacks.

Was I to blame that the wretched things burst in twenty places at once the first time they were used?  Was I to blame that two women were kept busy mending my sacks until they ceased to be sacks?  Charlie might think so, but I did not.

He reported the failure of my cotton-sack experiment with very unbecoming levity, as it struck me, accompanying his report with a somewhat unjust comment upon new-fangled notions, such as sewing-machines, etc., etc., winding up with—­“Now, when mother was alive” (I fairly winced), “the house was not considered too good for the darkies to sit on the back gallery with their work and make the sacks right under mother’s eye—­sewing them with good strong thread, too, that was spun for the purpose.  I can remember the old spinning-wheel:  it used to sit right at that end of the gallery.”

Like Captain Cuttle, I “made a note of it” for future use.

I often had occasion to wonder, during the early years of my married life, how it happened that the son of such an exceptionally perfect woman as I was compelled to presume my respected mother-in-law to have been, should have grown up with such shockingly disorderly habits as had my Charlie.  The wretched creature would stalk into my bed-room—­which I was particularly dainty about—­fresh from shooting or fishing, with pounds of mud clinging to his boots, bristling all over with cockleburs, his hands grimed with gunpowder; and helping himself to water from my ewer, he would begin dabbling in my china basin until he had reduced its originally pure contents into a compound of mud and ink, and would wind up by making a finish of my fresh damask towel, and throwing it on the bed or a chair instead of returning it to the rack, as he should have done.

“Charlie,” said I one day, saucily inviting a dose of “what mother did,” “what did mother used to do when you came into her room and turned it into a pig-stye, and then left it for her to clean up again?”

“She never let me do it,” said Charlie with a laugh.  “I’ll tell you how she did.  She had a tin basin on a shelf on the back gallery, and one of those great big rolling towels that lasted about a week; and after her washstand was fixed up in the morning, we knew better than to upset it, I can tell you.”