s. "Listen, Aunt Lucy," she said; "I will play and you may
sing. That will make you feel better, I think."

It was only from a perfect understanding of the negro character that this
proposal could come, and only a perfect dignity could carry it out with
grace; yet there, beneath the floor of the wide prairie sea, these
strange exercises were carried on, the low throbbing of the strings
according with the quavering minors of the old-time hymns, until Aunt
Lucy wiped her eyes and smiled.

"Thank yer. Miss Ma'y' Ellen," she said; "thank yer a thousand times.
You shoh'ly does know how toe comfort folks mighty well, even a pore ole
nigger. Law bless yer, honey, whut c'd I do without yer, me out yer all
erlone? Seems like the Lord done gone 'way fur off, 'n I kain't fotch
him noways; but when white folks like Miss Ma'y Ellen Beecham come set
down right side o' me an' sing wif me, den I know ther Lord, he standin'
by listenin'. Yas'm, he shoh'ly goin' to incline his eah!"

Women are women. There is no synonym. Women, white and white, black and
black, or, if need be, white and black, have sympathies and
understandings and revealings which they never carry to the opposite sex.
It is likely that no man ever explored the last intricacy of that sweet
and wondrous maze, a woman's heart; yet the woman who marries, and who
has with her a husband, sets herself for the time outside the circle of
all other husbandless women who may be about her. Thus it was
that--without any loss of self-respect upon the one side, or any
forgetfulness upon the other of that immovable line between black and
white which had been part of the immemorial creed of both--Mary Ellen and
Aunt Lucy, being companionless, sometimes drifted together in the way of
things.

On the morning following Aunt Lucy's devotional exercises that good soul
seemed to be altogether happy and contented, and without any doubts as to
her future welfare. She busied herself with the preparation of the food
for the chickens, meantime half unconsciously humming a song in
reminiscent minor. "Custard pie--custard pie," she sang, softly, yet
unctuously, as she stirred and mingled the materials before her; "custard
pie--_custard_ pie. Hope ter eat hit twell I die--twell I die."

Mary Ellen was out in the open air, bonnetless and all a-blow. It was a
glorious, sunny day, the air charged with some essence of vital stimulus.
Tall and shapely, radiant, not yet twenty-three years