“Trials must and will befall,
But with humble faith to see
Love inscribed upon them all,
This is happiness to me.”
TOM and Jimmy were quartered with an old colored woman called Aunt Margaret, one of the family servants, who in her old age had been furnished with a tiny brick house near the mansion, in which she had lived some years by herself. The house contained three rooms, two on the lower floor and one above stairs, and the master, who had dismissed the agent upon their arrival, and superintended the settling of the people himself, placed the two boys, Tom and Jimmy, in this upper room. Tom was greatly pleased on account of the quiet which he thought would result from their removal from the cabins or quarters of the rest of the hands, and pictured to himself many happy hours of study in the room up-stairs.
But he discovered his mistake very soon. Aunt Margaret was very fond of company, and the cabin was the common resort of half the working-people on the place, and study, to say nothing of quiet, was out of the question.
It was on the second evening after his arrival, at the close of the first day’s work in the field, that Tom took out his books. How sadly and mournfully he had missed his school all day, no one knew but himself; and now he took his books and slate with no small degree of pleasure.
“What’s the chile gwine to do?” asked the old woman, peering at him over her spectacles.
“Going to read and study a while by your candle, Aunt Margaret, if I may,” he replied.
“Laws, chile! you may do as you likes, for all me,” she returned with a shake of her head; “but it ’pears like there’ll be mighty little quiet here to-night.”