sage.

"Poor thing!" purred she. "I hope nothing will ever happen to Rozillah.
Isn't that a _love_-el-ly? I made it out of my own head from Rosa and
Zillah, two _love_-el-ly girls I read of in a book."

"I think it is a nasty name," was my deliberate reply.

She recoiled with a fine horror which stung me like a nettle.

"Oh, Molly! what a word for a little lady to use!"

I looked up at her for the first time, my eyes burning in dry sockets.

"I think your doll-baby is nasty, and Rozillah is a _nigger_ name! So
there!"

I could command no worse language, for I knew none.

Mary 'Liza looked shocked and terrified. She glanced right and left and
upward nervously, as fearing the punishment of heaven upon me.

"I am afraid that you are in a very bad humor," she faltered, her
self-possession forsaking her for a moment. "I'd better leave you."

She had gone a dozen paces when she glanced over her shoulder to say, in
her most grown-up and judicial manner:--

"I hope you will not make any noise and wake Rozillah up."

I rose and went straight to the cradle as soon as my cousin was out of
sight. Cold, deadly fury possessed and filled me, casting out fear of
consequences and routing the weakling conscience engendered and
nourished by parental counsel. I plucked Rozillah from her downy bed and
bore her into the air, cuffing her polished red cheeks soundly on the
way. Then I stripped off her gay raiment and knotted the ribbon sash
about her smooth neck. I had never tied a knot before, but this held, as
did the loop I cast over a projecting branch of the sickly
peach-sapling. Naked and forlorn, Rozillah dangled a foot and more from
the ground. I fetched my father's riding-whip from the hall table, and
the last feeble check upon my fury was released.

The next I knew a pair of cool, white arms closed about me and the whip
together, and Cousin Molly Belle's voice, half-laughing, half-horrified,
cried through the roaring in my ears:--

"Dear little Namesake! what has got into you?"

All at once, red mists parted and rolled away from my eyes, and I became
conscious that Mary 'Liza was jumping up and down and screaming
piteously, that everybody was on the spot--my father and mother and all
the dinner company, and Mam' Chloe with the baby in her arms, and a ring
of my small black servitors on the outside of the group; also that all
eyes were focussed on me and what was left of Rozillah.

The lash had drawn sawdust at every