Sometimes the children were with him, but usually he went alone, and once or twice he returned with red eyelids and asked for a julep.

There was little to fill his life now, and he divided it between Bernard and Eugenia, whom he adored, and the negroes, whom he reviled for diversion and spoiled to make amends.

“They will break me!” he would declare a dozen times a day.  “They will turn me out of house and home.  Here’s old Sambo’s Claudius come back and moved into the quarters.  He hasn’t a cent to his name, and he’s the most no ’count scamp on earth.  It’s worse than before the war—­upon my soul it is!  Then they lived on me and I got an odd piece of work out of them.  Now they live on me and don’t do a damned lick!”

“My dear Tom!” Miss Chris cheerfully remonstrated.  She had long been reconciled to her brother’s swearing propensities, which she regarded as an amiable eccentricity to be overlooked by a special indulgence accorded the male sex, but she never knew just how to meet him in a discussion of the servants.

“What is to be done about it?” she inquired gravely.  “Claudius left here at the beginning of the war, Aunt Griselda says, and he has never been back until now.  It seems he has brought his family.  He has lung-trouble.”

“Done about it!” repeated the general heatedly.  “What’s to be done about it?  Why, the rascal can’t starve.  I’ve just told Sampson to wheel him down a barrel of meal.  Oh, they’ll break me!  I shan’t have a morsel left!”

The next time it was an opposite grievance.

“What do you reckon’s happened now?” he asked, marching into the brick storeroom, where his sister was slicing ripe, red tomatoes into a blue china bowl.  “What do you think that fool Ish has done?”

Miss Chris looked up attentively, her large, fresh-coloured face expressing mild apprehension.  She had rolled back her linen sleeves, and the juice of the tomatoes stained her full, dimpled wrists.

“He hasn’t killed himself?” she inquired anxiously.

“Killed himself?” roared the general.  “He’ll live forever.  I don’t believe he’d die if he were strung up with a halter round his neck.  He’s moved off.”

“Moved off!” echoed Miss Chris faintly.  “Why, I believe Uncle Ish was living in that cabin on Hickory Hill before I was born.  I remember going up there to help him gather hickory nuts when I wasn’t six years old.  I couldn’t have been six because mammy Betsey was with me, and she died before I was seven.  I declare there were always more nuts on those trees than any I ever saw—­”

But the general broke in upon her reminiscences, and she took up a fresh tomato and peeled it carefully with a sharp-edged knife.

“Some idiots got after him,” said the general, “and told him if he went on living on my land he’d go back to slavery, and, bless your life, he has gone—­gone to that little one-room shanty where his daughter used to live, between my place and Burr’s—­as if I’d have him,” he concluded wrathfully.  “I wouldn’t own that fool again if he dropped into my lap straight from heaven!”