received them you’d have thought they had come straight down from heaven in answer to prayer.  I took him one side and said, ’Mulberry we can’t have them—­we’ve nothing for ourselves—­we can’t feed them.’  He looked at me kind of hurt, and said, ’Turn them out?—­and they’ve come to me just as confident and trusting as—­as—­why Polly, I must have bought that confidence sometime or other a long time ago, and given my note, so to speak—­you don’t get such things as a gift—­and how am I going to go back on a debt like that?  And you see, they’re so poor, and old, and friendless, and—­’ But I was ashamed by that time, and shut him off, and somehow felt a new courage in me, and so I said, softly, ‘We’ll keep them—­the Lord will provide.’  He was glad, and started to blurt out one of those over-confident speeches of his, but checked himself in time, and said humbly, ‘I will, anyway.’  It was years and years and years ago.  Well, you see those old wrecks are here yet.”

“But don’t they do your housework?”

“Laws!  The idea.  They would if they could, poor old things, and perhaps they think they do do some of it.  But it’s a superstition.  Dan’l waits on the front door, and sometimes goes on an errand; and sometimes you’ll see one or both of them letting on to dust around in here—­but that’s because there’s something they want to hear about and mix their gabble into.  And they’re always around at meals, for the same reason.  But the fact is, we have to keep a young negro girl just to take care of them, and a negro woman to do the housework and help take care of them.”

“Well, they ought to be tolerably happy, I should think.”

“It’s no name for it.  They quarrel together pretty much all the time —­most always about religion, because Dan’l’s a Dunker Baptist and Jinny’s a shouting Methodist, and Jinny believes in special Providences and Dan’l don’t, because he thinks he’s a kind of a free-thinker—­and they play and sing plantation hymns together, and talk and chatter just eternally and forever, and are sincerely fond of each other and think the world of Mulberry, and he puts up patiently with all their spoiled ways and foolishness, and so—­ah, well, they’re happy enough if it comes to that.  And I don’t mind—­I’ve got used to it.  I can get used to anything, with Mulberry to help; and the fact is, I don’t much care what happens, so long as he’s spared to me.”

“Well, here’s to him, and hoping he’ll make another strike soon.”

“And rake in the lame, the halt and the blind, and turn the house into a hospital again?  It’s what he would do.  I’ve seen aplenty of that and more.  No, Washington, I want his strikes to be mighty moderate ones the rest of the way down the vale.”

“Well, then, big strike or little strike, or no strike at all, here’s hoping he’ll never lack for friends—­and I don’t reckon he ever will while there’s people around who know enough to—­”