Topsy was smart and energetic in all manual operations, learning everything that was taught her with surprising quickness.  With a few lessons, she had learned to do the proprieties of Miss Ophelia’s chamber in a way with which even that particular lady could find no fault.  Mortal hands could not lay spread smoother, adjust pillows more accurately, sweep and dust and arrange more perfectly, than Topsy, when she chose,—­but she didn’t very often choose.  If Miss Ophelia, after three or four days of careful patient supervision, was so sanguine as to suppose that Topsy had at last fallen into her way, could do without over-looking, and so go off and busy herself about something else, Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours.  Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the pillowcases, butting her woolly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be grotesquely ornamented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s night-clothes, and enact various performances with that,—­singing and whistling, and making grimaces at herself in the looking-glass; in short, as Miss Ophelia phrased it, “raising Cain” generally.

On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her rehearsals before the glass in great style,—­Miss Ophelia having, with carelessness most unheard-of in her, left the key for once in her drawer.

“Topsy!” she would say, when at the end of all patience, “what does make you act so?”

“Dunno, Missis,—­I spects cause I ’s so wicked!”

“I don’t know anything what I shall do with you, Topsy.”

“Law, Missis, you must whip me; my old Missis allers whipped me.  I an’t used to workin’ unless I gets whipped.”

“Why, Topsy, I don’t want to whip you.  You can do well, if you’ve a mind to; what is the reason you won’t?”

“Laws, Missis, I ‘s used to whippin’; I spects it’s good for me.”

Miss Ophelia tried the recipe, and Topsy invariably made a terrible commotion, screaming, groaning and imploring, though half an hour afterwards, when roosted on some projection of the balcony, and surrounded by a flock of admiring “young uns,” she would express the utmost contempt of the whole affair.

“Law, Miss Feely whip!—­wouldn’t kill a skeeter, her whippins.  Oughter see how old Mas’r made the flesh fly; old Mas’r know’d how!”

Topsy always made great capital of her own sins and enormities, evidently considering them as something peculiarly distinguishing.

“Law, you niggers,” she would say to some of her auditors, “does you know you ’s all sinners?  Well, you is—­everybody is.  White folks is sinners too,—­Miss Feely says so; but I spects niggers is the biggest ones; but lor! ye an’t any on ye up to me.  I ’s so awful wicked there can’t nobody do nothin’ with me.  I used to keep old Missis a swarin’ at me half de time.  I spects I ’s the wickedest critter in the world;” and Topsy would cut a summerset, and come up brisk and shining on to a higher perch, and evidently plume herself on the distinction.