“I trust Charlie get bit by no snake!”
“Prancing Nigger! It a lil too late now to t’ink ob dat.”
Since to avoid overcrowding the family party, Charlie was to follow with his butterfly net, and arrive as he could. And never were butterflies (seen in nigger-boys’ dreams as brilliant, or frolicsome, as were those of mid-savannah.) Azure Soledads, and radiant Conquistadors with frail flamboyant wings, wove about the labouring mules perpetual fresh rosettes.
“De Lord protect de lad,” Mr. Mouth remarked, relapsing into silence.
Onward through the cloudless noontide, beneath the ardent sun, the caravan drowsily crawled. As the afternoon advanced, Mrs. Mouth produced a pack of well-thumbed cards, and cutting, casually, twice, began interrogating Destiny with these. Reposing as best she might, Miami gave herself up to her reflections. The familiar aspect of the wayside palms, the tattered pennons of the bananas, the big silk-cottons (known, to children, as “Mammee-trees”), all brought to her mind Bamboo.
“Dair’s somet’in’ dat look like a death dah, dat’s troublin’ me,” Mrs. Mouth remarked, moodily fingering a greasy ace.
“De Almighty forgib dese foolish games!” Mr. Mouth protestingly said.
“An’ from de lie ob de cards ... it seem as ef de corpse were ob de masculine species.”