in fixing her up to appear to
the best advantage for youth and sprightliness. She was only sixty, but
hard labor and severe usage had told upon her heavily.

Aunt Kizzie, in her new linsey-woolsey and shining bandana as a turban,
started off in great glee for the Court House. That she might appear
there fresh, brisk, and pert, she was not suffered to walk, but
Washington, the coachman, was ordered to drive her in the ark of the
plantation wagon. Joe, smart, smiling, and newly-equipped in clothes,
sat by her side, scarcely knowing whether he had best share in his
mother's uncommon gaiety, or yield to his own anxious misgiving.

Another thing contributed to Aunt Kizzie's happiness. All the way to the
Court House she was at perfect liberty to caress her nosegay of pinks
and camomile. Kizzie had two grand passions; one was for her children,
the other for her fragrant pinks. If she was allowed a garden patch the
size of a hat-crown, it was devoted to her favorite flowers. She was
wont to have her loom festooned with them; she drank in their perfume as
did her web its woof; by night she had them scattered over her pillow,
that, even in sleep, she might not lose their presence.

"I should think pinks would grow out of her nose," the servants were in
the habit of remarking. It really often looked like they did, for,
morning and evening, at her milking, her nose, instead of her hand,
served as bouquet-holder.

Over the rough roads then, from Thornton Hall to the Court House, her
attention was devoted to Joe and her pinks. She was to be sold--that was
true--but then she had left a hated mistress. She had with her all she
loved, her immense nosegay, her baby Joe, and, in her small bundle, her
one pair of ruffled pillow-slips. She was starting out in the world
again, and the world looked to her unaccountably new and beautiful.

It was morning now that shone upon Aunt Kizzie and her child. But night
came, utterly dark and cheerless night, to both mother and boy. The two
were put upon the block together. The boy showed for himself. But the
sexagenarian human chattel was mercilessly scrutinized. She was made to
sing, dance, and run. Her red turban was torn off, and in spite of the
hirsutian manipulations to which she had been subjected, her wool
appeared, like Shakspeare's spirits, mixed, black, white, and grey.

She was seized by the nose and chin, as if she had been a horse, and
made to distend her jaws even painfully. She expe