“Why not?”
“I’m not accustomed to it, and I don’t find it’s wholesome.”
Not wholesome to drink before breakfast! That was “a new kink” to our jolly host, and troubled him as much as a new “ism” would an old fogy. Not wholesome? He had always reckoned it warn’t very wholesome not to drink before breakfast. He did not expect I had seen a great many healthier men than he was, had I? and he always took a drink before breakfast. If a man just kept himself well strung up, without ever stretching himself right tight, he didn’t reckon damps or heat would ever do him much harm. He had never had a sick day since he came to this place, and he reckoned that this was owin’ considerable to the good rye whisky he took. It was a healthy trac’ of land, though, he believed, a mighty healthy trac’; everything seemed to thrive here. We must see a nigger-gal that he was raisin’; she was just coming five, and would pull up nigh upon a hundred weight.
“Two year ago,” he continued, after taking his dram, as we sat by the fire in the north room, “when I had a carpenter here to finish off this house, I told one of my boys he must come in and help him. I reckoned he would larn quick, if he was a mind to. So he come in, and a week arterwards he fitted the plank and laid this floor, and now you just look at it; I don’t believe any man could do it better. That was two year ago, and now he’s as good a carpenter as you ever see. I bought him some tools after the carpenter left, and he can do anything with ’em—make a table or a chest of drawers or anything. I think niggers is somehow nat’rally ingenious; more so ’n white folks. They is wonderful apt to any kind of slight.”
I took out my pocket-map, and while studying it, asked Yazoo some questions about the route East. Not having yet studied geography, as he observed, he could not answer. Our host inquired where I was going, that way. I said I should go on to Carolina.
“Expect you’re going to buy a rice-farm, in the Carolinies, aint you? and I reckon you’re up here speckylating arter nigger stock, aint you now?”
“Well,” said I, “I wouldn’t mind getting that fat girl of yours, if we can made a trade. How much a pound will you sell her at?”
“We don’t sell niggers by the pound in this country.”
“Well, how much by the lump?”
“Well, I don’t know; reckon I don’t keer about sellin’ her just yet.”