hen you says I
ain't, you means I is, an' when you says I is, you means I ain't. Dat's
de sort o' flapjack I's wuckin' fur!"

The woman flirted out of the dining-room, and the old gentleman drew
another long breath, glad it was over. He really had little reason to
quarrel about the globe, bent or unbent; he never used it. It sat in his
study year in and year out, its dusty twinkle brightened at long
intervals by old Rose's spiteful rag.

The Captain ate on placidly. There had been a time when he was dubious
about such scenes with Rose. Once he felt it beneath his dignity as a
Southern gentleman to allow any negro to speak to him disrespectfully.
He used to feel that he should discharge her instantly and during the
first years of their entente had done so a number of times. But he could
get no one else who suited him so well; her biscuits, her corn-light-
bread, her lye-hominy, which only the old darkies know how to make. And,
to tell the truth, he missed the old creature herself, her understanding
of him and his ideas, her contemporaneity; and no one else would work
for a dollar a week.

Presently in the course of his eating the old gentleman required another
biscuit, and he wanted a hot one. Three mildly heated disks lay on a
plate before him, but they had been out of the oven for five minutes and
had been reduced to an unappetizing tepidity.

A little hand-bell sat beside the Captain's plate whose special use was
to summon hot biscuits. Now, the old lawyer looked at its worn handle
speculatively. He was not at all sure Rose would answer the bell. She
would say she hadn't heard it. He felt faintly disgruntled at not
foreseeing this exigency and buttering two biscuits while they were hot,
or even three.

He considered momentarily a project of going after a hot biscuit for
himself, but eventually put it by. South of the Mason-Dixon Line, self-
help is half-scandal. At last, quite dubiously, he did pick up the bell
and gave it a gentle ring, so if old Rose chose not to hear it, she
probably wouldn't: thus he could believe her and not lose his temper and
so widen an already uncomfortable breach.

To the Captain's surprise, the old creature not only brought the
biscuits, but she did it promptly. No sooner had she served them,
however, than the Captain saw she really had returned with a new line of
defense.

She mumbled it out as usual, so that her employer was forced to guess at
a number of words: "Dat nigger, Pete