nker 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--"

"Him lack for friends!" and she tilted her head up with a frank pride--
"why, Washington, you can't name a man that's anybody that isn't fond of
him. I'll tell you privately, that I've had Satan's own time to keep
them from appointing him to some office or other. They knew he'd no
business with an office, just as well as I did, but he's the hardest man
to refuse anything to, a body ever saw. Mulberry Sellers with an office!
laws goodness, you know what that would be like. Why, they'd come from
the ends of the earth to see a circus like that. I'd just as lieves be
married to Niagara Falls, and done with it." After a reflective pause
she added--having wandered back, in the interval, to the remark that had
been her text: "Friends?--oh, indeed, no man ever had more; and such
friends: Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Johnston, Longstreet, Lee--many's the
time they've sat in that chair you're sitting in--" Hawkins was out of it
instantly, and contemplating it with a reverential surprise, and with the
awed sense of having trodden shod upon holy ground--

"They!" he said.

"Oh, indeed, yes, a many and a many a time."

He continued to gaze at the chair fascinated, magnetized; and for once in
his life that continental stretch of dry prairie which stood for his
imagination was afire, and across it was marching a s