aited, thinking to
herself,--

"If Nan will only take her under her wing, all will go well."

Old Nan's tenderness of heart was unlimited. If her worst enemy were in
pain or sorrow, she would succor him: ready perhaps to take up the
threads of her resentment again, as soon as his sufferings were
alleviated; but a very Samaritan of good offices as long as he needed
them. Caesar, so well understood this trait in her, that in their
matrimonial disputes, which, it must be confessed, were frequent and
sharp, when all other weapons failed him, he fell back on the colic. He
had only to interrupt the torrent of her reproaches, with a groan, and a
twist of his fat abdomen, and "oh, honey, I'm so bad in my stomach!" and
she was transformed, in an instant from a Xantippe into a Florence
Nightingale: the whole current of her wrath deviated from him to the
last meal he had eaten, whatever it might be.

"Now, it's jist nothin' but that pesky bacon you ate this mornin',
Caesar: you sha'n't never touch a bit again's long's you live; do you
hear?" and with hot water and flannels, she would proceed to comfort and
coddle him as if no anger had ever stirred her heart.

When she saw poor Sarah Little sink crying into a chair, and heard the
humble gratefulness of her words; and, moreover, felt herself, as it
were, distinctly taken into confidence by the implied reference to the
unhappy past,--old Nan melted.

"There, there, honey: don't ye take on so. We're jest powerful glad to
get you here, we be. I was a tellin' Miss Hetty yesterday she couldn't
live here alone, noways: we couldn't any of us stand it. Come along into
the dinin'-room, an' Caesar he'll give you a glass of his blackberry
wine. Caesar won't let anybody but hisself touch the blackberry wine, an'
hain't this twenty year."

"Here, Caesar! you, Caesar! where be yer? Come right in here, you loafin'
niggah." This was Nan's most affectionate nickname for her husband; it
was always accompanied with a glance of proud admiration, which was the
key to the seemingly opprobrious epithet, and revealed that all it
really meant was a complacent satisfaction in her breast that her
husband was in a position to loaf if he liked to,--a gentleman of
leisure and dignity, so to speak, subject to no orders but her own.

Caesar could hardly believe his ears when he heard himself called upon to
bring a glass of his blackberry wine to Mrs. Sarah Little. This was not
at all in keeping with the l