I never realized before how cut off from the world persons are who depend on steamboats. Here was this dear lady, born and bred one of the finest ladies of the land, but being of a naturally retiring disposition and always having been occupied from her girlhood with keeping house she had let the world pass her by.
"What were the two things you saw, Miss Maria?" asked Mary gently.
"Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch and the Old Homestead. I was quite shocked at the latter, was really glad I was with a lady. I think I would have sunk through the floor from mortification had there been a gentleman with me."
"The Old Homestead shocking?" I asked wonderingly. "Not the Old Homestead! It must have been something else."
"Oh, no, I remember the title distinctly. It was when they had that scene with that naked statue in the parlor. It was terrible to me."
What a compliment to have paid the author and actor of that time-honored play! Actually the statue of the Venus de Milo had shocked this simple soul from the country just exactly as Denman Thompson had made it do the old man in the melodrama. Mary and I didn't laugh, but we almost burst from not doing so.
"And now I must send Harvie down to the quarters to make those good-for-nothings return. Sick, indeed! I intend to make every last one of them take a dose of castor oil and turpentine!"
And the intrepid lady was as good as her word.
THE gumbo being made and nothing to do but cook it, and that quite slowly, I was able to run from my self-imposed duties for a while and join the crowd that had formed to go to the negro quarters and persuade them that they were not sick, that there was no ghost, and that their duty and interests lay at Maxton.
The cabins were at least a quarter of a mile from the great house, and very comfortable and picturesque they were. The road lay through a beautiful oak forest and then skirted a corn field. Each cabin had a good piece of ground around it and from every chimney there arose a curl of blue smoke. They were evidently expecting a visit from the family, because there were several little pickaninnies waiting at a turn in the road, and when they saw us they set off in a great hurry shouting:
"That's to give them time to get into bed before we get there," said Harvie sagely. "I wish I knew Latin and Greek as well as I do the coloreds' methods."