ry, locate himself in a big wicker chair,
tilt his chair back and elevate his feet to the top of the banisters, and
stare out over the cottonfields. This position he would maintain,
probably, about twenty minutes. Then the pangs of hunger would render him
restless, and he would draw out his watch to note the time of day. The
next step in the formula would bring him back to my room door while I was
still sleepily trying to reconnect the broken links of a dream, from which
vain effort he would startle me into wide-awake reality by a stentorian
"Lulie, Lulie! Come, wife--it's breakfast-time."

Upon which, instead of "heroic fortitude," I would treat him to a little
cross "Please yell at the cook, Charlie, and not at me. I'm sure if people
_will_ get up at such unearthly hours, they should expect to be kept
waiting for their breakfast."

Then the spirit of unrest would impel Charlie toward the back door, where
I would hear him commanding, exhorting, entreating.

Mentally registering a vow to give my husband a dose of Mrs. Winslow's
Soothing Syrup on the coming night, I would relinquish all hope of another
nap, get up and dress myself, and join my roaring lion on the front
gallery, where we would both sit meekly waiting for the allied forces of
kitchen and dining-room to decide upon the question of revictualing us.

"Lulie," said Charlie to me one morning at the breakfast-table, "things
are getting all out of gear about this house, somehow or other."

I put down the coffee-pot with a resigned thump and asked my lord, with an
injured air, to please explain himself.

"Well, when mother was alive I never knew what it was to sit down to my
breakfast later than six o'clock in summer or seven in winter."

"How did she manage it, Charlie?" I asked, very meekly.

"Why, by getting up early herself. No servant on the face of the globe is
going to get up at daybreak and go to work in earnest when she knows her
mistress is sound asleep in bed. I will tell you how mother did: she had a
pretty good-sized bell, that she kept on a table by her bedside, and every
morning, as soon as her eyes were open, she would give such a peal with
that old bell that all the servants on the premises knew that 'Mistress
was awake and up,' and bestirred themselves accordingly. There was no
discount on mother: that was the way she made father a rich man, too."

"But, Charlie, you're already a rich man, and why on earth should we get
out of bed at dayb