Our quiet camp now became the centre of a bustling neighbourhood--a road was laid out through the ravine close by our door for the purpose of carting earth to the river, and huge piles of earth and stones rose around us on every side. A party of slaves and free blacks, at work for an extensive landed proprietor who claimed a front of sixty feet, kept up an incessant laughing and chattering which would have shamed a monkey or a yahoo.
There was no longer any pleasure in being idle, and we determined to go to work with the rest without waiting any longer for rain. We made almost nothing in the morning, and I began really to doubt if we should ever succeed in earning enough to get home with; but the afternoon's work was much more encouraging. Our schemes were now all exhausted; we had nothing more to rely upon but patient, unremitting toil, and we determined henceforth to lose no more time in idle dreaming, but to work as long and hard as we could wherever we could make four dollars a day. We continued to mine in the immediate vicinity of our tent for the next two months, sometimes in our bank, and at others in the wide sandy slope between it and the river; and at the end of that time, besides paying all our debts, we found ourselves worth in dust nearly one hundred dollars apiece.
Though our harvest had not been very plentiful, we were unwilling to let Thanksgiving pass unnoticed. Number Four took dinner with us, and we did our best, as usual on such occasions, to provoke appetite to the utmost and yet give it an overwhelming defeat. Our first course consisted of roast beef nicely baked under a cheese box, potatoes, onions, and apple-sauce ad libitum. This was succeeded by a regular oldfashioned Christmas pudding, the crowning glory of the occasion, wanting nothing but eggs and milk, flanked on either side by a molasses pie, and a dish of tarts well stuffed with delectable currant jelly, and bravely supported by a dessert of raisins and English walnuts.
The pies would hardly have passed muster with Aunt Chloe; "they were pies sartin, but then what kind o' crust?" but perhaps that renowned "perfectioner" would have experienced some difficulty in making her "rale flecky paste" if she had had to roll it out with a bottle on the under side of a three-legged stool.