fringe hit
mo'ns a heap mo'nfuler 'n ribbon do."

Needless to say, a license so full and free as this found fine
expression in a field of flowering weeds quite rare and beautiful to
see.

Moriah had proven herself in many ways an exceptional person even before
the occasion of her bereavement, and in this, contrary to all precedent,
she had rashly cast her every garment into the dye-pot, sparing not even
so much as her underwear.

Moriah was herself as black as a total eclipse, tall, angular, and
imposing, and as she strode down the road, clad in the sombre vestments
of sorrow, she was so noble an expression of her own idea that as a
simple embodiment of dignified surrender to grief she commanded respect.

The plantation folk were profoundly impressed, for it had soon become
known that her black garb was not merely a thing of the surface.

"Moriah sho' does mo'n for Numa. She mo'ns f'om de skin out." Such was
popular comment, although it is said that one practical sister, to whom
this "inward mo'nin'" had little meaning, ventured so far as to protest
against it.

"Sis Moriah," she said, timidly, as she sat waiting while Moriah
dressed for church--"Sis Moriah, look ter me like you'd be 'feerd dem
black shimmies 'd draw out some sort o' tetter on yo' skin," to which
bit of friendly warning Moriah had responded, with a groan, and in a
voice that was almost sepulchral in its awful solemnity, "_When I mo'n
I mo'n!_"

Perhaps an idea of the unusual presence of this great black woman may be
conveyed by the fact that when she said, as she was wont to do in
speaking of her own name, "I'm named Moriah--after a Bible mountain,"
there seemed a sort of fitness in the name and in the juxtaposition
neither the sacred eminence or the woman suffered a loss of dignity.

And this woman it was who, after eight years of respectable wifehood and
but four weeks of mourning her lost mate, calmly announced that she was
to be married again.

The man of her choice--I use the expression advisedly--was a neighbor
whom she had always known, a widower whose bereavement was of three
months' longer standing than her own.

The courtship must have been brief and to the point, for it was
positively known that he and his _fiancee_ had met but three times
in the interval when the banns were published.

He had been engaged to whitewash the kitchen in which she had pursued
her vocation as cook for the writer's family.

The whitewashing was don