tmortem statement of my spiritual pathology would have been complete
and exact which failed to take note of her stringent preventive
measures.

Now be it known, that Aunt Judy's piety was in no respect of the
niggerish kind; when I say "colored," I mean one thing, respectfully;
and when I say "niggerish," I mean another, disgustedly. I am not
responsible for the distinction: it is a true "cullud" nomenclature, and
very significant; our fellow-citizens of African descent themselves
employ it, nicely and wisely; and when they call each other "nigger" the
familiar term of opprobrium is applied with all the malice of a sting,
and resented with all the sensitiveness of a raw. So when I say that my
Auntie's piety was not of the niggerish kind, even Zoe, "The Octoroon,"
or any other woman or man in whose veins courses the blood of Ham four
times diluted, knows that I mean it was not that glory-hallelujah
variety of cunning or delusion, compounded of laziness and catalepsy,
which is popular among the shouting, shirt-tearing sects of plantation
darkies, who "git relijin" and fits twelve times a year. To all such
she used to say, "'T ain't de real grace, honey,--'t ain't de sure
glory,--you hollers too loud. When you gits de Dove in your heart, and
de Lamb on your bosom, you'll feel as ef you was in dat stable at
Bethlehem and de Blessed Virgin had lent you de sleepin' Baby to hold."
She would not have shrunk from lifting up her voice and crying aloud in
the market-place, if thereby she might turn one smart butcher from the
error of his _weighs_; but for steady talking to the Lord, she preferred
my bedside or the back-stairs.

But in those days the kitchen was my paradise, by her transmuted. As a
child, and not less now than then, I had a consuming longing for
snuggery; my one fair, clear idea of the consummate golden fruit of the
spirit's sweet content was a cosey place to get away to. In my longing I
purred with the cat rolled up in her furry ball on the rug by the fire,
making a high-post bedstead of a chair; in my longing I stole with
furtive rats to their mysterious cave-nests in the wall. So do I
now,--the more for that I lost, so long ago, my dear kitchen, my
Aunt-Judyness,--my home.

"I behold it everywhere,
On the earth, and in the air,
But it never comes again."

At this moment I feel the dresser in the corner, gleaming with the
cook's refulgent pride of polished tins; I am sensible of that pulpit
iron