“It isn’t so in Vermont.”
“Ah, well, in New England, and in the free States, you have the better of us, I grant. But there’s the bell; so, Cousin, let us for a while lay aside our sectional prejudices, and come out to dinner.”
As Miss Ophelia was in the kitchen in the latter part of the afternoon, some of the sable children called out, “La, sakes! thar’s Prue a coming, grunting along like she allers does.”
A tall, bony colored woman now entered the kitchen, bearing on her head a basket of rusks and hot rolls.
“Ho, Prue! you’ve come,” said Dinah.
Prue had a peculiar scowling expression of countenance, and a sullen, grumbling voice. She set down her basket, squatted herself down, and resting her elbows on her knees said,
“O Lord! I wish’t I ’s dead!”
“Why do you wish you were dead?” said Miss Ophelia.
“I’d be out o’ my misery,” said the woman, gruffly, without taking her eyes from the floor.
“What need you getting drunk, then, and cutting up, Prue?” said a spruce quadroon chambermaid, dangling, as she spoke, a pair of coral ear-drops.