ght she had gone to bed with her long black kid party
gloves on, and she tried to pull them off. When she couldn't get them
off, she raised up in bed and looked at herself in a mirror, and that
was the time she yelled, and I went in the room to help her. Well, sir,
she hadn't missed a 'place on her face, neck and arms, and the paste
shone just like patent leather. I said, aunty, you can go into the
nigger show business, and she said, what is it, and I said, I give it up
for I am no end man."

[Illustration: Wanted me to send for a doctor 035]

"Then she yelled again. Oh, dear, I was never so sorry for a high-born
lady in my life, but to encourage her I told her I read of a white woman
in Alabama that turned black in a single night, and the niggers would
never have anything to say to her, because she was a hoodoo, and wasn't
in their class, and then she yelled again and wanted me to send for a
doctor, and I told her there wasn't any negro doctor in town, and what
she wanted was to send for a scrubwoman, and then I showed her the box
of shoe paste and told her she had got in the wrong box, and she laid it
to me and shooed me out of the room like I was a hen, and she has been
all the forenoon trying to wash that shoe paste off, but it will have to
wear off, 'cause it is fast colors, and aunty has got to go to a heathen
meeting at the church to-night, and she will have to send regrets. Don't
you think women are awful careless about their toilets?" and the boy
rubbed his red hair with a piece of sand-paper, because some one had
told him sand-paper would take the red out of his hair.

"Do you know," said Uncle Ike, as the cigar swelled up in the center
and began to curl on the end, and he threw it to the hens, and watched a
rooster pick at it and make up a face, "if I was your aunt I would skin
you alive? If you were a little older, we would ship you on a naval
vessel, where you couldn't get ashore once a year, and you could get
punished every day."

"I wouldn't go in the navy, unless I could be Dewey. Dewey has a snap.
Every day I read how he has ordered some man thrown overboard. The other
day a Filipino shoemaker brought him a pair of shoes and charged him two
dollars more for them than he agreed to, and Dewey turned to a coxswain,
or a belaying pin, or something, and told them to throw the man
overboard. Uncle Ike, do you think Dewey throws everybody overboard that
the papers say he does?"

"Well, I wouldn't like to