Buck, glad to escape any farther tongue lashing from his relative, and always pleased to play and sing, tuned the banjo and began:
“‘Hi,’ said the ’possum as he shook the ‘simmon tree,
‘Golly,’ said the rabbit; ‘you shake ’em all on me.’
An’ they went in wif they claws, an’ they licked they li’l paws,
An’ they took whole heaps home to they maws.”
After several stanzas sung in a soft melodious voice, Buck, at Molly’s request, gave them, to a chanting recitative the following song, composed by a friend of Buck’s, and worthy to be incorporated in American folk-lore, so Professor Green laughingly assured Mrs. Brown.
THE MURDER OF THE RATTAN FAMILY.
“One evening in September, in eighteen ninety-three,
Jim Stone committed a murder, as cruel as it could be.
’Twas on the Rattan family, while they were preparing for their bed.
Jim Stone, he rapped upon the door, complaining of his head.
The first was young Mrs. Rattan. She come to let him in.
He slew her with his corn knife—that’s where his crime begin.
The next was old Mrs. Rattan. Old soul was feeble and gray.
Truly she fought Jim Stone a battle till her strength it give way.
The next was the little baby. When he, Jim Stone did see,
He raised up in his cradle. ‘Oh! Jim Stone, don’t murder me!’
Next morning when he was arrested—wasn’t sure that he was the one.
Till only a few weeks later he confessed to the crime he done.
They took him to Southern Prison, which they thought was the
safetes’ place.
When they marched him out for trial, he had a smile upon his face.
And after he was sentenced, oh! how he did mourn and cry.
One day he received a letter, saying his daughter was bound to die.
Next morning he answered the letter and in it he did say,
‘Tell her I’ll meet her there in Heaven, on the sixteenth of Februway.’
They led him upon the scaffold with the black cap over his head.
And he hung there sixteen minutes ‘fore the doctors pronounced
him dead.
Now wouldn’t it have been much better if he’d stayed at home
with his wife,
Instead of keeping late hours, and taking that family’s life?”
CHAPTER VII.—PICTURES ON MEMORY’S WALL.
The next week was a very quiet and peaceful one at Chatsworth. There had been so many excitements, with burglars and negro uprisings and what not, that Molly was afraid her visitors would think Kentucky deserved the meaning the Indians attached to it—“the dark and bloody battle-ground.”
Ernest, home for a vacation from his labors in the West, endeavored to keep Judy from missing the attentions of Kent, who was back at his grind in Louisville in the architect’s office, and did not get home each day until time for a late supper. Judy liked Ernest very well, as she did all of the Browns, but Kent and Molly were her favorites still, and the evenings were the best of all when Kent came home and, as he put it, “relieved Ernest.”
Molly found herself on easier terms with Professor Green than she had ever imagined possible. If he did not consider her quite an old lady, she at least was beginning to look upon him as not such a very old gentleman. He played what Kent designated as a “cracker-jack” game of tennis, and turned out to be as good a horseman as the Brown boys themselves.
“If he only had a little more hair on his forehead,” thought Molly, “he would look right young.”
Aunt Mary was the unconscious means of consoling her for his lack of hair. “Honey, I likes yo’ teacher mo’n any Yankee I ever seed. He’d oughter rub onions on his haid to stimilate the roots. Not but what he ain’t han’some, baldish haid an’ all, with them hones’ eyes an’ that upstandin’ look. I done took notice that brains don’ make the best sile to grow ha’r on an’ lots er smart folks is baldish. Mindjer, I wouldn’ go so fer as to say bald haided folks is all smart. It looks like some er them is so hard-haided the ha’r can’t break th’ough the scalp.”