The floor of the summer-house at Uncle Carter's was of lovely white sand, and did not soil my clean pink gingham frock, although I sat down flat upon it. Under one of the three benches that furnished it, I had dug a vault yesterday. It was modelled upon the description given in The Fairchild Family of one belonging to a nobleman's estate. My self-education was essentially Squeersian. When I read a thing, I forthwith went and did it. The gardener had lent me a trowel, and I had found a thin, flat stone that served as a cover. Digging was easy work in the top-dressing of sand and the substratum of loose, dry soil.
There were eight niches in the vault—two on a side. When all was finished, I sallied forth in quest of occupants. My vault was stocked by nightfall. In one niche was a dead sparrow my cousin Burwell had shot by mistake and thrown away. In a second was a frog on which a horse or cow had trod, crippling it so badly that Uncle Carter mercifully killed it with a blow of his stick. The poultry-yard and an epidemic of pip supplied me with two more silent tenants. A mouse-trap strangled a fifth, the gardener's mole-trap yielded up a sixth. Nos. 7 and 8 were land-terrapins ("tar'pens," in negro dialect), which I knew must be dead when I found them, although I could discern no sign of violence. Their shells were shut so tightly that I could not force a straw between the upper and lower, and no amount of kicking and thumping elicited any sign of life.
An innovation upon the Fairchild pattern was the deposit in the bottom of the vault of a tumbler full of flies which Aunt Eliza told the dining room servant to throw into the kitchen fire. A primitive snare for these destroyers of the housewife's peace was made by filling a tumbler within an inch of the brim with strong soap-suds, and fitting upon the top a round cover of thick "sugar-loaf paper," with a hole in the middle. Molasses was smeared all around this hole upon the under side of the paper, and an alluring drop or two on the top attracted attention to the larger supply of sweets. At least a quart of flies, per day, were caught in this way in the height of the season before window and door screens were invented.
I waylaid the man and tumbler in the back porch.
"Are they dead, sure enough?" I whispered.
"Dead as a door-nail, little mistis."
"Give 'em to me, please! I'll bury them."
He complied, good-naturedly. I poured the contents of the glass into the vault, and strewed fine dry sand over them an inch deep. Then I fitted on the flat stone, and said nothing to anybody of my new branch of industry.