damaged goods,
she always managed to get near to hear the directions; and she
generally was the one to apply them also, for negroes always would
steal medicines most scurvily one from the other. And when death at
times would slip into the pen, despite the trader's utmost alertness
and precautions,--as death often "had to do," little Mammy said,--when
the time of some of them came to die, and when the rest of the
negroes, with African greed of eye for the horrible, would press
around the lowly couch where the agonizing form of a slave lay
writhing out of life, she would always to the last give medicines,
and wipe the cold forehead, and soothe the clutching, fearsome hands,
hoping to the end, and trying to inspire the hope that his or her
"time" had not come yet; for, as she said, "Our time doesn't come just
as often as it does come."

And in those sad last offices, which somehow have always been under
reproach as a kind of shame, no matter how young she was, she was
always too old to have the childish avoidance of them. On the
contrary, to her a corpse was only a kind of baby, and she always
strove, she said, to make one, like the other, easy and comfortable.

And in other emergencies she divined the mysteries of the flesh, as
other precocities divine the mysteries of painting and music, and so
become child wonders.

Others came and went. She alone remained there. Babies of her
babyhood--the toddlers she, a toddler, had nursed--were having babies
themselves now; the middle-aged had had time to grow old and die.
Every week new families were coming into the great back chamber; every
week they passed out: babies, boys, girls, buxom wenches, stalwart
youths, and the middle-aged--the grave, serious ones whom misfortune
had driven from their old masters, and the ill-reputed ones, the
trickish, thievish, lazy, whom the cunning of the negro-trader alone
could keep in circulation. All were marketable, all were bought and
sold, all passed in one door and out the other--all except her, little
Mammy. As with her lameness, it took time for her to recognize, to
understand, the fact. She could study over her lameness, she could in
the dull course of time think out the broomstick way of palliation.
It would have been almost better, under the circumstances, for God to
have kept the truth from her; only--God keeps so little of the truth
from us women. It is his system.

Poor little thing! It was not now that her master _could_ not s