ddess!" purred Alicia, stroking Mrs. Belinda Black's satiny head.
"And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a devotee at her shrine,
to butter the paws of some two-legged cats in Hyndsville!"

"You-all's dinnah 's waitin'." Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the
notion that any meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner;
lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out of a basket at
church picnics and eaten out of one's hand, or lap, for choice.
"What was de text to-day, Miss Sophy? Ah sort o' likes to chaw easy
on a mout'ful o' text whilst Ah 'm washin' up mah dishes."

We gave her the text, which happened to be one that fills every
negro's heart with undiluted joy: "O ye dry bones, hear the word of
the Lord." And we had the satisfaction of hearing her rolling out,
to the clatter of pans and pots:

"Dry bones in de valley,
Ma-a-ah, La-a-awd!
Whut yuh gwine do wid dem dry bones,
Ma-ah-ah La-a-a-w-wd"

while we went up-stairs to change our frocks. We were still sharing
one room then, finding it more convenient. And there, in front of
our door, in a nest of ferns and mosses, was a great cluster of wild
flowers, summer's last and autumn's first children. They had been
gathered in no ordered garden, but taken from the skirts of the
fields and the bosom of the woods; and Carolina the opulent, the
beautiful, the free-handed, does not deck herself niggardly.

Alicia's face that had been so wistful lighted with a sudden joy.
She gave a happy cry:

"Ariel!" she cried, "Ariel! Oh, what a heavenly thing, what a
_human_ thing to do! And to-day, too, just when we need a little bit
of friendliness!" She looked around with a queer, shy smile.

"Ariel!" she called, "Ariel, no matter who comes, or goes, or what
happens in Hynds House, _we_ believe in you. Don't leave us, Ariel!
Maker of music, bringer of blossoms, stay!"

CHAPTER V

"THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"

Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a
satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba
Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd
only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined
to be damned. _I_ know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices,
so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change,
that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.

That old woman would as lief have had what remained