What Might Have Been Expected

by Frank R. Stockton

But the most important of Kate's duties was the personal attention she paid to Aunt Matilda. She went over to the old woman's cabin every day or two, and saw that she was kept warm and had what she needed.

And these visits had a good influence on the old woman, for her cabin soon began to look much neater, now that a nice little girl came to see her so often.

When the spring came on, Aunt Matilda actually took it into her head to whitewash her cabin, a thing she had not done for years. She and Uncle Braddock worked at it by turns. The old woman was too stiff and rheumatic to keep at such work long at a time; but she was very proud of her whitewashing; and when she was tired of working at the inside of her cabin, she used to go out and whitewash the trunks of the trees around the house. She had seen trees thus ornamented, and she thought they were perfectly beautiful.

Kate was violently opposed to anything of this kind, and, at last, told Aunt Matilda that if she persisted in surrounding her house with what looked like a forest of tombstones, she, Kate, would have to stop coming there.

So Aunt Matilda, in a manner, desisted.

But one day she noticed a little birch-tree, some distance from the house, and the inclination to whitewash that little birch was too strong to be resisted.

"He's so near white, anyway," she said to herself, "dat it's a pity not to finish him."

So off she hobbled with a tin cup full of whitewash and a small brush to adorn the little birch-tree, leaving her cabin in the charge of Holly Thomas.

Holly, whose whole name was Hollywood Cemetery Thomas, was a little black girl, between two and five years old. Sometimes she seemed nearly five, and sometimes not more than two. Her parents intended christening her Minerva, but hearing the name of the well-known Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, they thought it so pretty that they gave it to their little daughter, without the slightest idea, however, that it was the name of a grave-yard.

Holly had come over to pay a morning visit to Aunt Matilda, and she had brought her only child, a wooden doll, which she was trying to teach to walk, by dragging it head foremost by a long string tied around its neck.