And thus it came about that, being once more circumvented by Durand on New Year’s eve in a trivial matter at which any other officer would have laughed, he resorted to ways and means which a man with a finer sense of honor would have despised and—­again he failed.  But his chance came on New Year’s day, when Durand, led into one of the worst scrapes of his life by Blue, fell into his clutches and the outcome was so serious that the entire brigade was restricted to the Yard’s limits for three months, and gloom descended not only upon the Academy but upon all its friends.

Naturally, with her boys debarred from Middies’ Haven, Mrs. Harold could do little for the girls, and their only sources of pleasure lay in such amusements as the town afforded and these were extremely limited.  So much time was spent at Severndale with Peggy, and it was during one of these visits that Mrs. Harold figured in one of the domestic episodes of Severndale.  They were not new to Peggy for she was Southern-born and used to the vagaries and childlike outbreaks of the colored people.  But even though Mrs. Harold had lived among them a great deal, and thought she understood them pretty thoroughly, she had yet to learn some of the African’s eccentricities.

January dragged on, the girls working with Captain Pennell and Dr. Llewellyn.  During the month, one of the hands, Joshua Jozadak Jubal Jones, by the way, fell ill with typhoid fever, and was removed to the hospital.  From the first his chances of recovery seemed doubtful, and “Minervy” his wife, as strapping, robust a specimen of her race as poor Joshua was tiny and, as she expressed it, “pore and pindlin’,” was in a most emotional frame of mind.  Again and again she came up to the great house to “crave consolatiom” from Miss Peggy, or Mammy Lucy, though, truth to tell, Mammy’s sympathies were not very deeply enlisted.  Minervy Jones did not move in the same social set in which Mammy held a dignified position:  Mammy was “an emerged Baptis’”; Minervy a “Shoutin’ Mefodist,” and a strong feeling existed between the two little colored churches.  Peggy visited the hospital daily and saw that Joshua lacked for nothing.  Mrs. Harold was deeply concerned for Peggy’s sake, for Peggy looked to the well-being of all the help upon the estate with the deep interest which generations of her ancestors had manifested, indeed regarded as incumbent upon them and part of their obligation to their dependents.

Days passed and poor Joshua grew no better, Minervy meanwhile spending most of her time in Aunt Cynthia’s kitchen where she could sustain the inner woman with many a tidbit from the white folks’ table, and speculate upon what was likely to become of them if her “pore lil chillern were left widderless orphans.”  It need hardly be added that the prospective “widderless orphans” were left to shift largely for themselves while she was accepting both mental and physical sustenance.