When the dresses were brought up to her she would put them on again and go down to flinch before kindly eyes and to make embittered speeches in her high, shrill voice.  Outwardly she grew more soured and more eccentric.  On mild summer evenings she would come down stairs with her head wrapped in a pink knitted “nubia,” and stroll back and forth along the gravelled walk, her gaunt figure passing into the dusk of the cedar avenue and emerging like the erratic shadow of one of the sombre trees.

Sometimes Eugenia joined her, but Bernard, her favourite, held shyly aloof.  In her exercise she seldom spoke, and her words were peevish ones, but there was grim pathos in her carriage as she moved slowly back and forth between the straight rows of box.

After supper the family assembled on the porch and talked in a desultory way until ten o’clock, when the lights were put out and the house retired to rest.  Eugenia slept in a great, four-post bedstead with Aunt Chris, and the bed was so large and soft and billowy that she seemed to lose herself suddenly at night in its lavender-scented midst, and to be as suddenly discovered in the morning by Rindy, the house-girl, when she came with her huge pails of warm water.

Those fresh summer dawns of Eugenia’s childhood became among her dearest memories in after years.  There were hours when, awaking, wide-eyed, before the house was astir, she would rise on her elbow and look out across the dripping lawn, where each dewdrop was charged with opalescent tints, to the western horizon, where the day broke in a cloud of gold.  The song of a mocking-bird in the poplars of the little graveyard came to her with unsuspected melody—­a melody drawn from the freshness, the loneliness, the half-awakened calls from hidden nests and the lyric ecstasy of dawn.

Then, with the rising of the sun, Aunt Chris would turn upon her pillow and open her soft, brown eyes.

“It is not good for little folks to be awake so early,” she would say, and there would rush upon the child a sense of warmth and tenderness and comfort, and she would nestle closer to her sweet, white pillow.  With the beginning of day began also the demands upon the time of Miss Chris. First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go to pasture.  Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a pessimistic head.

“Lawd, Miss Chris, one er dem ole coons done eat up er hull pa’cel er yo’ chickens.”  And Miss Chris, at once the prop and the mainstay of the Battle fortunes, would rise with anxious exclamations and put on her full black skirt and linen sacque.

When breakfast was over Miss Chris went into the storeroom each morning and came out with a basin of corn-meal dough, followed by Sampson bearing an axe and Aunt Verbeny jingling the hen-house keys.  The slow procession then filed out to the space before the hen-house, the door of which was flung back, while Aunt Verbeny clucked at a little distance.  Miss Chris scattered her dough upon the ground and, while her unsuspecting beneficiaries made their morning meal, she pointed out to Sampson, the executioner, the members of the feathered community destined to be sacrificed to the carnivorous habits of their fellow mortals.