My bedroom was exactly as when I last slept in it, on my one visit to the farm as a boy of fifteen. Drusilla had seemed only a baby then—a slender little five-year old. She had followed me about in silence, with adoring eyes, and I had teased her!—I hated to think of how I had teased her.
The gold in her hair was all dulled and faded, the rose-leaf color of her cheeks had faded, too, and her blue eyes wore a look of weary patience. She worked hard. Her mother was evidently feeble now, and the labor required in that primitive home was considerable.
The old negro brought water from the spring and milked the cows, but all the care of the dairy, the cooking for the family, the knitting and sewing and mending and the sweeping, scrubbing and washing was in the hands of Aunt Dorcas and Drusilla.
She would make her mother sit down and chat with me, while Uncle Jake smoked his cob pipe, but she herself seemed always at work.
"There's no getting any help nowadays," said my Uncle. "Even if we needed it. Old Joe there stayed on—he was here before I was born. Joe must be eighty or over—there's no telling the age of niggers. But the young ones are too uppity for any use. They want to be paid out of all reason, and treated like white folks at that!"
He boasted that he had never worn a shirt or a pair of socks made off the place. "In my father's time we raised a heap of cotton and sold it. Plenty of niggers then. Now I manage to get enough for my own use, and we spin and weave it on the spot!"
I watched Aunt Dorcas at her wheel and loom, and rubbed my eyes. It was only in the remote mountain regions that these things were done when I was young, and to see it now seemed utterly incredible. But Uncle Jake was proud of it.
"I don't believe there's another wheel agoin' in the whole country," he said. "The mountains ain't what they used to be, John. They've got the trees all grafted up with new kinds of foolishness—nuts and fruit and one thing'n another—and unheard-of kinds of houses and schools, and play-actin' everywhere. I can't abide it."
He set his jaw firmly, making the stiff white beard stand out at a sharp angle. "The farm'll keep us for my time," he concluded; "but I should hate to have it all 'reformed' and torn to pieces after I'm gone." And he looked meaningly at me.
I lingered on, still enjoying the sense of family affection, but my satisfaction in the things about me slowly cooling.