Compunction had already seized upon the widow.
“Susan,” she began, “I fear we are
not mortifyin’ the flesh as we ought—–”
“No mortifying just yet, if you please,”
cried Susie. “The most important thing
of all is yet to be done. Zeb hasn’t heard
the news; just think of it! You must write and
tell him that I’ll help you spin the children’s
clothes and work the farm; that we’ll face everything
in Opinquake as long as Old Put needs men. Where
is the ink-horn? I’ll sharpen a pen for
you and one for me, and such news as he’ll
get! Wish I could tell him, though, and see the
great fellow tremble once more. Afraid of me!
Ha! ha! ha! that’s the funniest thing—Why,
Mother Jarvis, this is Christmas Day!”
“So it is,” said the widow, in an awed
tone. “Susie, my heart misgives me that
all this should have happened on a day of which Popery
has made so much.”
“No, no,” cried the girl. “Thank
God it is Christmas! and hereafter I shall keep
Christmas as long as love is love and God is good.”
ITS DISCOVERY
Jeff, the hero of my tale, was as truly a part of
the Southern Confederacy as the greater Jeff at Richmond.
Indeed, were it not for the humbler Jeff and the class
he represented, the other Jeff would never have attained
his eminence.
Jeff’s prospects were as dark as himself.
He owned nothing, not even himself, yet his dream
of riches is the motive of my tale. Regarded
as a chattel, for whom a bill of sale would have been
made as readily as for a bullock, he proved himself
a man and brother by a prompt exhibition of traits
too common to human nature when chance and some heroism
on his part gave into his hands the semblance of a
fortune.
Jeff was a native Virginian and belonged to an F.F.V.
in a certain practical, legal sense which thus far
had not greatly disturbed his equanimity. His
solid physique and full shining face showed that slavery
had brought no horrors into his experience. He
had indulged, it is true, in vague yearnings for freedom,
but these had been checked by hearing that liberty
meant “working for Yankees”—appalling
news to an indolent soul. He was house-servant
and man-of-all-work in a family whose means had always
been limited, and whose men were in the Confederate
army. His “missus” evinced a sort
of weary content when he had been scolded or threatened
into the completion of his tasks by nightfall.
He then gave her and her daughters some compensation
for their trials with him by producing his fiddle
and making the warm summer evening resonant with a
kind of music which the negro only can evoke.
Jeff was an artist, and had a complacent consciousness
of the fact. He was a living instance of the
truth that artists are born, not made. No knowledge
of this gifted class had ever suggested kinship; he
