n, for she said she wuz goin' herself to
the Fair that day and take Dotie, who hadn't been at all. I told her it
would be a job to take care of a child in that big crowd.

But she said, "I'd rather take care of Miss Dotie than to eat any time.
And as for the crowd it wuz nothin' to crowds she'd been in when she
lived in Paris with Miss Louise and Prince Arthur. She had took him when
he wuz a little boy to the Boy Bolony and the Champin Eliza when there
wuz millions of folks there." She wuz always talking of Prince Arthur,
which I fancied wuz a pet name for a child, and still given to the young
man she wuz constantly talkin' about through her pride and love for him.

Aunt Tryphena wuz from slave parentage, but she had always lived in
white families since a child, so she had little of the peculiar dialect
of her race. But she wuz black as the Founder of Evil himself, tall and
thin with a mighty head of wool white as snow, which she covered with a
yellow turban about her work. She had abnormal powers of falsehood, not
for profit or to make trouble, but jest simple lying for lie's sake. The
most incredible stories she would string off, and nothing pleased Billy
more than to git her to goin', as he called it.

He would call our attention silently and reach behind her when she wuz
about her work and turn an imaginary crank in her back, and then in the
same pantomime would jump back as if in fear of the fatal power he'd
invoked, but would wickedly delight in the endless stream of talk let
forth, occasionally asking a few questions, enough to keep her going.
She would lean on top of her broom and tell of her former adventures
thrilling enough and lengthy enough to fill a dozen lives. But
everything had happened to her personally, very few noted people but she
had seen and been on intimate terms with, very few far distant countries
but what she had visited, "Santered through," as she termed it.

In a fine disregard for geography she would tell of stepping from
Chicago over to the Phillippines, and so on to London and then to
Europe. She detailed many adventures in Paris and described places that
made us think that she had some time lived there. She said she went
there with Miss Louise and her son, Prince Arthur, when he wuz little,
as his nurse. And she described him as having all the virtues of his sex
with none of its frailties. She said she had his picture which she would
show us some day. She described his mother as a "pro