abin on the place for many years, and derived a respectable revenue
from the neglected grapevines. This, doubtless, accounted for his advice
to me not to buy the vineyard, though whether it inspired the goopher
story I am unable to state. I believe, however, that the wages I pay him
for his services are more than an equivalent for anything he lost by the
sale of the vineyard.

PO' SANDY by Charles W. Chesnutt

On the northeast corner of my vineyard in central North Carolina, and
fronting on the Lumberton plank-road, there stood a small frame house,
of the simplest construction. It was built of pine lumber, and contained
but one room, to which one window gave light and one door admission. Its
weather-beaten sides revealed a virgin innocence of paint. Against one
end of the house, and occupying half its width, there stood a huge brick
chimney: the crumbling mortar had left large cracks between the bricks;
the bricks themselves had begun to scale off in large flakes, leaving
the chimney sprinkled with unsightly blotches. These evidences of decay
were but partially concealed by a creeping vine, which extended its
slender branches hither and thither in an ambitious but futile attempt
to cover the whole chimney. The wooden shutter, which had once protected
the unglazed window, had fallen from its hinges, and lay rotting in the
rank grass and jimson-weeds beneath. This building, I learned when I
bought the place, had been used as a school-house for several years
prior to the breaking out of the war, since which time it had remained
unoccupied, save when some stray cow or vagrant hog had sought shelter
within its walls from the chill rains and nipping winds of winter.

One day my wife requested me to build her a new kitchen. The house
erected by us, when we first came to live upon the vineyard, contained
a very conveniently arranged kitchen; but for some occult reason my wife
wanted a kitchen in the back yard, apart from the dwelling-house, after
the usual Southern fashion. Of course I had to build it.

To save expense, I decided to tear down the old school-house, and
use the lumber, which was in a good state of preservation, in the
construction of the new kitchen. Before demolishing the old house,
however, I made an estimate of the amount of material contained in it,
and found that I would have to buy several hundred feet of new lumber in
order to build the new kitchen according to my wife's plan.

One morning old