The old woman attempted no opposition; she allowed the negro to take up an armful of sticks, and led the way up-stairs in silence, Paul still accompanying them, from an unwillingness to remain alone with the strange man.
Jube's intentions were of the most praiseworthy description, but it must be confessed that his success in making a fire was not equal to his ambition. When Mrs. Allen saw that he only succeeded in raising a smoke instead of kindling a flame, she took the matter into her own hands, and speedily the knots and kindlings were hissing and snapping on the unused hearth at a famous rate.
"Jube learn," Paul said, smiling at both, and trying to comfort the negro's evident discomfiture, "learn very quick. Tout suit!"
"Yes, little masser," he replied; "Jube know how next time."
Mrs. Allen signified to them that they were to sleep in that room; there was a trundle bed for Paul, which Katharine had occupied when a child, and she improvised a very comfortable sort of couch for the attendant. She spread a bit of rag carpet before Paul's bed, and made every thing homelike and tidy for the shivering strangers.
"Come down and warm," she said, when her preparations were completed, noticing that they shivered with cold.
Paul and Jube followed her down-stairs and took their former seats by the fire, while she, after stealing into the bedroom, to be certain that Katharine slept, took her station by the hearth likewise, and remained gazing drearily into the fire.
At last she seemed to remember how late it was, and, getting up, took a brass warming-pan, with its long wooden handle, which she filled with hot coals. Thus armed, she went up-stairs, came down again after an absence of ten minutes, and told her guests to go up to bed before the sheets got cold.
When the two went up-stairs, Jube found his humble bed warmed comfortably, like that of his little master.