parties are always sure to end in
trouble for the devil puts powder in the cakes and the only way to stop
him is to turn them three times round when they're baking and touch them
each time with a forked hazel twig."

Phyl read this passage over twice. The mention of Prue interested her
vastly. Prue even then had evidently been a favourite of Juliet's.

She read on hoping to find the name of the coloured woman again, but it
did not occur.

The diary, indeed, did not run over more than a year and a half, but
scrappy as it was and short in point of time, the character of Juliet
shone forth from it, uneasy, impetuous, tormenting and loving.

Many books could not have depicted the people round Vernons so well as
this scribbling of a child. Mary Mascarene, quiet, rather a spoil-sport
and something of a tale-teller, dead and gone Pinckneys and Rhetts. Aunt
Susan, Cousin Jane Pinckney, Uncle George who beat his coloured man,
Darius, because the said Darius had let him go out with one brass button
missing from his blue coat. Simon Pinckney--the one whose ghost
walked--and who "fell down in the garden because he had the hiccups,"
these and others of their time lived in the little black book given by the
miserly Aunt Susan "to keep as my diary and not to forget to write each
day my evil deeds as well as my good."

Towards the end there was another reference to Rupert Pinckney, the tragic
lover of the future:

"Rupert Pinckney was here to-day with his mother to luncheon and we had a
palmetto salad and mother said when he was gone he was the most frivulus
boy in Charleston, whatever that was, and too much of a dandy, but father
said he had stuff in him and Aunt Susan, who was here too, said 'Yes,
stuff and nonsense,' and I said he could ride his pony without tumbling
off like Silas Rhett, anyhow.

"Then they went on talking about his people and how they hadn't as much
money as they used to have, and Aunt Susan said that was so, and the worst
of it is they're spending more money than they used to spend, and father
said, well, anyhow, that wasn't a very common complaint with _some_ people
and he left the room. He never stays long in the room with Aunt S.

"I think the Pinckneys are real nice."

"Mr. Simon Mascarene from Richmond and his wife came to see us to-day and
stay for a week. They drove here in their own carriage with four brown
horses and you could not tell which horse was which, they are so alike,
they are very fi