ragout, roast fowl,
dessert, ice-creams and all,--and she creates it all out of chaos and
old night down there, in that kitchen. I think it really sublime, the
way she manages. But, Heaven bless us! if we are to go down there, and
view all the smoking and squatting about, and hurryscurryation of the
preparatory process, we should never eat more! My good cousin, absolve
yourself from that! It's more than a Catholic penance, and does no more
good. You'll only lose your own temper, and utterly confound Dinah. Let
her go her own way."

"But, Augustine, you don't know how I found things."

"Don't I? Don't I know that the rolling-pin is under her bed, and the
nutmeg-grater in her pocket with her tobacco,--that there are sixty-five
different sugar-bowls, one in every hole in the house,--that she washes
dishes with a dinner-napkin one day, and with a fragment of an old
petticoat the next? But the upshot is, she gets up glorious dinners,
makes superb coffee; and you must judge her as warriors and statesmen
are judged, _by her success_."

"But the waste,--the expense!"

"O, well! Lock everything you can, and keep the key. Give out by
driblets, and never inquire for odds and ends,--it isn't best."

"That troubles me, Augustine. I can't help feeling as if these servants
were not _strictly honest_. Are you sure they can be relied on?"

Augustine laughed immoderately at the grave and anxious face with which
Miss Ophelia propounded the question.

"O, cousin, that's too good,--_honest!_--as if that's a thing to be
expected! Honest!--why, of course, they arn't. Why should they be? What
upon earth is to make them so?"

"Why don't you instruct?"

"Instruct! O, fiddlestick! What instructing do you think I should do?
I look like it! As to Marie, she has spirit enough, to be sure, to kill
off a whole plantation, if I'd let her manage; but she wouldn't get the
cheatery out of them."

"Are there no honest ones?"

"Well, now and then one, whom Nature makes so impracticably simple,
truthful and faithful, that the worst possible influence can't destroy
it. But, you see, from the mother's breast the colored child feels and
sees that there are none but underhand ways open to it. It can get along
no other way with its parents, its mistress, its young master and missie
play-fellows. Cunning and deception become necessary, inevitable
habits. It isn't fair to expect anything else of him. He ought not to
be punished for it. As to honesty,