important items has been
pocket-handkerchiefs, with which I provided her, and she has to keep
them in her pocket. For two or three days lately she has forgotten
this essential article, and I finally told her that if it was
forgotten the next day I should have to send her home for it. I had
forgotten all about it, till, the next morning when she came to pour
the water into my tub for me, a most inordinate snuffling betrayed the
absent wipe. "Rose, where's your pocket-handkerchief? have you
forgotten it again?" No answer, but a hiding of the head under her arm
like a duck, which often takes place when she is in fault. "Then,
Rose, put the coffee on, sweep the parlor, and go home for it." This
elicited, "me no gwine home," a pert rejoinder I could not understand,
till on calling her to me I saw by her face how excessively green I
had been. I reprimanded her with a sober face as she again repeated
"me no gwine home," at the same time untwisting the handkerchief from
about her waist, but when she had left the room I should have shaken
the bed, if that had been my style of laughter. Robert is a great wag
in his way, though we do not see so much of his fun, as, having been
used to the house in "Secesh time," he is utterly undemonstrative
before white people and is only gradually thawing into a little more
communicativeness. But we overhear him sometimes talking with the
others. A most entertaining but not quite so pleasant exhibition of it
(and C. and I could not help laughing at Rose and Hester's
good-natured, amusing account) was his riding after the two girls one
day when he had been out for the horses, extolling himself and
insisting that they should call him "Maussa" or he would ride them
down, with his spurs on! Hester gave in, but Rose wouldn't--"him too
mannish!"

There is a great deal of tyrannizing over each other. "Mind now, min',
run quick or I knock you,"--or "kill you dead" it is as likely to
be,--is an ordinary method of getting anything done, while "cursing,"
as they call calling names, etc., is one of the hardest things I have
to contend with in school, they are so quick to interpret any look or
act into an offense and resent it on the spot with word or blow.

_Sept. 9._ I had a long talk with some of my big girls who had been
very noisy and fighting--they do "knock" each other most unmercifully,
and I can't instill any better notions into them. "Anybody hurt you,
you _'bleeged_ to knock 'em," is the univers