ead sparrow my cousin Burwell had shot by
mistake and thrown away. In a second was a frog on which a horse or cow
had trod, crippling it so badly that Uncle Carter mercifully killed it
with a blow of his stick. The poultry-yard and an epidemic of pip
supplied me with two more silent tenants. A mouse-trap strangled a
fifth, the gardener's mole-trap yielded up a sixth. Nos. 7 and 8 were
land-terrapins ("tar'pens," in negro dialect), which I knew must be dead
when I found them, although I could discern no sign of violence. Their
shells were shut so tightly that I could not force a straw between the
upper and lower, and no amount of kicking and thumping elicited any sign
of life.

An innovation upon the Fairchild pattern was the deposit in the bottom
of the vault of a tumbler full of flies which Aunt Eliza told the
dining room servant to throw into the kitchen fire. A primitive snare
for these destroyers of the housewife's peace was made by filling a
tumbler within an inch of the brim with strong soap-suds, and fitting
upon the top a round cover of thick "sugar-loaf paper," with a hole in
the middle. Molasses was smeared all around this hole upon the under
side of the paper, and an alluring drop or two on the top attracted
attention to the larger supply of sweets. At least a quart of flies, per
day, were caught in this way in the height of the season before window
and door screens were invented.

I waylaid the man and tumbler in the back porch.

"Are they dead, sure enough?" I whispered.

"Dead as a door-nail, little mistis."

"Give 'em to me, please! I'll bury them."

He complied, good-naturedly. I poured the contents of the glass into the
vault, and strewed fine dry sand over them an inch deep. Then I fitted
on the flat stone, and said nothing to anybody of my new branch of
industry.

I was tired of being called "an old-fashioned child!" My mother's oft
and resigned ejaculation--"What _next_, I wonder!" was to my ears a
covert reproach for not being "steady" and "a comfort," like Mary 'Liza.
Even my less critical father's shout of laughter at any unusual freak or
experiment abraded my moral cuticle sometimes. At home the colored
children would have entered heartily into my mortuary enterprise,--yes!
and kept my counsel. The reticence of the serf exceeds in dumb
doggedness that of a misunderstood child. But I did not play with Uncle
Carter's little negroes. Every Southern child comprehended the
distinction between