“Want to help?” Judith had asked, and soon deft old fingers were vying with young ones.
“Why, Cousin Ann, you have regular fairy fingers,” said Judith, and the old lady had blushed with delight. They worked until the task was completed, while Mrs. Buck nodded over “Holy Living and Dying.”
In the morning, when Judith made her early way to the kitchen, she found a fire burning briskly in the stove, the kettle ready to boil and the wood box filled. Uncle Billy, smiling happily, was seated in the doorway. Judith thanked him heartily and he assured her he liked to help white ladies, but didn’t hold much to helping his own race. 231
“They’s ongrateful an’ proudified an’ the mo’ you holps ’em the mo’ they shifts. Me’n Miss Ann has been visitin so long we ain’t entered much inter housekeepin’, but somehow we seem so sot an’ statiumnary now that it comes nachul ter both er us ter len’ a han’.”
“That’s nice,” laughed Judith. “I do hope you and Cousin Ann and Cupid and Puck will all feel at home. I wish you would keep your eye open for a nice, respectable woman who could help me, now that I have so many dinners to serve to the trolley men.”
“I sho’ will—an’, Miss Judy, I’m wonderin’ if you ain’t got a little bitser blue cloth what I mought patch my pants with. If my coattails wa’n’t so long I wouldn’t be fitten ter go ’mongst folks.”
After some discussion with her mother, in which the girl tried to make Mrs. Buck see the difference between saving and hoarding, Judith finally produced for old Billy many leftovers of maternal and paternal grandfathers.
“Mumsy, you are a trump. Now, you see you saved these things so someone deserving could use them, but if they had stayed in the attic until the moths had eaten them up while old Billy went ragged then that would have been wasteful hoarding.” 232
“I’m not minding so much about your Grandfather Buck’s things, but somehow it seems a desecration for that old darkey to be wearing your Grandfather Knight’s trousers.”
“That’s what makes me say you are a trump, Mumsy. I know you look upon those broadcloth pants as a kind of sacred trust, and I just love you to death for giving in about them.”