me of your nicest preserves."

"_Aunt Harriet_, indeed!" she exclaimed, and then she gave him a look
that was cold enough to freeze him, and hard enough to send him through
the floor.

I think she relented a little, for she went to one of the windows,
bigger than any door you see nowadays, and looked out over the blooming
orchard; and then after a while she came back to us, and was very
gracious. She patted me on the head; and I must have shrunk from her
touch, for she laughed and said she never bit nice little boys. Then she
asked me my name; and when I told her, she said my grandmother was the
dearest woman in the world. Moreover, she told my companion that it
would spoil preserves to carry them about in a tin bucket; and then she
fetched a big basket, and had it filled with preserves, and jelly, and
cake. There were some ginger-preserves among the rest, and I remember
that I appreciated them very highly; the more so, since my companion had
a theory of his own that ginger-preserves and fruit-cake were not good
for sick people.

I remember, too, that Mrs. Tomlinson had a little daughter about my own
age. She had long yellow hair and very black eyes. She rode around in
the Tomlinson carriage a great deal, and everybody said she was
remarkably pretty, with a style and a spirit all her own. The negroes
used to say that she was as affectionate as she was wilful, which was
saying a good deal. It was characteristic of Harriet Bledsoe, my
grandmother said, that her little girl should be named Lady.

I heard a great many of the facts I have stated from old Aunt Fountain,
one of the Tomlinson negroes, who, for some reason or other, was
permitted to sell ginger-cakes and persimmon-beer under the
wide-spreading China trees in Rockville on public days and during court
week. There was a theory among certain envious people in
Rockville--there are envious people everywhere--that the Tomlinsons,
notwithstanding the extent of their landed estate and the number of
their negroes, were sometimes short of ready cash; and it was hinted
that they pocketed the proceeds of Aunt Fountain's persimmon-beer and
ginger-cakes. Undoubtedly such stories as these were the outcome of pure
envy. When my grandmother heard such gossip as this, she sighed, and
said that people who would talk about Harriet Bledsoe in that way would
talk about anybody under the sun. My own opinion is, that Aunt Fountain
got the money and kept it; otherwise she would not h