rawing-rooms and ring their bells for the
servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes
the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that
and knowing they're emancipated. They've got to look on themselves as part
of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emancipated rubbish in my house,
and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence.
They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and
good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more
emancipated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only
difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if you
were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such
rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know
how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want
to talk to them."

She led the way down passages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and
full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open
side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up
sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying
dresser.

There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was
done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an
English country house.

Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were
roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long
metal ladle.

By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in
cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and
perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was
born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on.
Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for
herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she
said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as
though she were still mistress of the kitchen--as in fact she was. She had
become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to a
hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was
marvellous in its retentiveness.

She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she
could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene