for some
healthful occupation: I was tired of playing at living. I resolved on a
brilliant plan. I would out-mother mother, for she only _saw_ to the
making of the sacks: I would make them myself, every one of them, on my
sewing-machine. If I couldn't make cotton-sacks on it, what was the use of
having it?

Charlie had informed me that he would send me down seven or eight women
from the quarters to make the sacks. I informed him with a flourish that I
should need but one: I should want her to cut the sacks out. Charlie
thanked me, and Martha and I and "Wheeler & Wilson" made the sacks.

Was I to blame that the wretched things burst in twenty places at once the
first time they were used? Was I to blame that two women were kept busy
mending my sacks until they ceased to be sacks? Charlie might think so,
but I did not.

He reported the failure of my cotton-sack experiment with very unbecoming
levity, as it struck me, accompanying his report with a somewhat unjust
comment upon new-fangled notions, such as sewing-machines, etc., etc.,
winding up with--"Now, when mother was alive" (I fairly winced), "the
house was not considered too good for the darkies to sit on the back
gallery with their work and make the sacks right under mother's
eye--sewing them with good strong thread, too, that was spun for the
purpose. I can remember the old spinning-wheel: it used to sit right at
that end of the gallery."

Like Captain Cuttle, I "made a note of it" for future use.

I often had occasion to wonder, during the early years of my married life,
how it happened that the son of such an exceptionally perfect woman as I
was compelled to presume my respected mother-in-law to have been, should
have grown up with such shockingly disorderly habits as had my Charlie.
The wretched creature would stalk into my bed-room--which I was
particularly dainty about--fresh from shooting or fishing, with pounds of
mud clinging to his boots, bristling all over with cockleburs, his hands
grimed with gunpowder; and helping himself to water from my ewer, he would
begin dabbling in my china basin until he had reduced its originally pure
contents into a compound of mud and ink, and would wind up by making a
finish of my fresh damask towel, and throwing it on the bed or a chair
instead of returning it to the rack, as he should have done.

"Charlie," said I one day, saucily inviting a dose of "what mother did,"
"what did mother used to do when you came into her