But an inner voice replied: "You would not wish to be a servant anywhere."
Then across she went to the bars that formed the far boundary of the wide garden.
Well back of the house in the direction of the stables, old Uncle Gambo was cutting grass with a winding scythe, that had a handle so long it reached way above the old man's head.
Uncle Gambo declared he was "a hun'erd an' ten yeah ole," and as no one could very well dispute it, no one tried to. But as year after year rolled away, Uncle Gambo would still say, "I'se a hun'erd and ten yeah ole."
"Yes, but the same story you told me two years ago, Uncle Gambo," Lionel once said to him. "You must be a hundred and twelve now."
The old negro shook his white, woolly head. "No, no! I'se a hun'erd and ten yeah ole; I allurs was, I allurs shell be."
That settled it. But as the white people knew that the colored men and women usually became seventy-five or a hundred years old very rapidly with their way of reckoning, no one so much wondered at Uncle Gambo's age.
Sally watched the old man reaping, for it fascinated her to see the rich, ripe grass lie smooth and evenly shorn wherever the scythe's keen blade swept over it. Then she strolled still farther along, trotting down and down until she stood near the stables.
A groom was trying to comb a splendid black hunter,—a fine saddle horse,—that champed as though a bit were in its mouth, and stepped and curved around, until Bill, the groom, was out of patience and exclaimed:
"Come now, Hotspur, you crazy coot, stan' still, cain't you! Be a genl'man fo' once, Hotspur, and I'll comb you with a bran' fire new brush, Mars' gib me las' night."