Step up quick, now, Brindle, an' git yo' place.
Lord have mussy! Des look how Brindle meck way fur Lady! I know'd Lady'd git dar fust! I know'd it!
An' dat's huccome I mixed dat feed so purtic'lar.
I does love Lady!
Old Reub' Tyler, pastor of Mount Zion Chapel, Sugar Hollow Plantation, was a pulpit orator of no mean parts. Though his education, acquired during his fifty-ninth, sixtieth, and sixty-first summers, had not carried him beyond the First Reader class in the local district school, it had given him a pretty thorough knowledge of the sounds of simple letter combinations. This, supplemented by a quick intuition and a correct musical ear, had aided him to really remarkable powers of interpretation, and there was now, ten years later, no chapter in the entire Bible which he hesitated to read aloud, such as contained long strings of impossible names hung upon a chain of "begats" being his favorite achievements.
A common tribute paid Reub's pulpit eloquence by reverential listeners among his flock was, "Brer Tyler is got a black face, but his speech sho' is white." The truth was that in his humble way Reub' was something of a philologist. A new word was to him a treasure, so much stock in trade, and the longer and more formidable the acquisition, the dearer its possession.
Reub's unusual vocabulary was largely the result of his intimate relations with his master, Judge Marshall, whose body-servant he had been for a number of years. The judge had long been dead now, and the plantation had descended to his son, the present incumbent.
Reub' was entirely devoted to the family of his former owners, and almost any summer evening now he might be seen sitting on the lowest of the five steps which led to the broad front veranda of the great house where Mr. John Marshall sat smoking his meerschaum. If Marshall felt amiably disposed he would often hand the old man a light, or even his own tobacco-bag, from which Reub' would fill his corn-cob pipe, and the two would sit and smoke by the hour, talking of the crops, the weather, politics, religion, anything—as the old man led the way; for these evening communings were his affairs rather than his "Marse John's." On a recent occasion, while they sat talking in this way, Marshall was congratulating him upon his unprecedented success in conducting a certain revival then in progress, when the old man said: