she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't
find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down
another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about
anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful.
Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on
hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes.
The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the
undertaker--the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and
then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was
Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but
she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the time
I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out
her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been
aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that
family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between
us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was
alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some
about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two
myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's
room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked
to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there. The old
lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty of niggers,
and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there mostly.

Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on
the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines
all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a little
old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever
so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken" and
play "The Battle of Prague" on it. The walls of all the rooms was
plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was
whitewashed on the outside.

It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and
floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day,
and it was a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn't be better. And
warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it too!

CHAPTER XVIII.

COL. GRANGERFORD was a gentlema