“Come out of there, you little rascal,” laughed Uncle John. “What do you see pretty about that big, ugly calf?”
“Oh, Uncle John,” sighed Little Sister, “I’m so sorry for him—he isn’t pretty, to be sure—and so I have given him my beads. But he has a lovely curly head,” she added encouragingly, “and he seems to be such a healthy child.”
On another occasion they missed Little Sister about night. Everybody started out in alarm. Grandma found her first, coming from the brood-sow’s lot.
“Where in the world have you been, darling?” asked Grandma, as she picked her up.
“Playing with the little yesterday pigs,” she said. “And, Grandma, I ought to have come home sooner, but I kissed one of the cunningest of the little pigs good-night, and all the others looked so hurt, and squealed so because I didn’t kiss them, too, I just had to catch every one of them and kiss them before they would go to sleep. Indeed, I did.”
Inheritance had played a Hamlet’s part in Little Sister’s make-up. Most children crow, and babble, and lisp, and talk in divers and different languages before they learn to talk English, while some never learn at all. But not so with Little Sister. The first word she ever attempted was perfectly pronounced. The first sentence she put together was grammatically correct. The correctness of her language, for one so small, made it sound so quaint that I often had to laugh at its quaintness, while her deep earnestness and intensity but added to its originality.
And she picked up so many things from Uncle John. Else where did she get this: Pete was a little darkey on the farm whose chief business was to entertain Little Sister when everything else failed. Pete’s repertoire consisted of all the funny things a monkey ever did, but his two star performances were “racking” like Deacon Jones’ old claybank pacer, and “playin’ possum.” Little Sister never tired of having Pete do these two. And it was comical. Everybody knew Deacon Jones, with his angular, sedate, solemn way of riding, and the unearthly, double-shuffling, twisting, cork-screw gait of his old pacer. The ludicrous gait of the old pacer struck Pete early in life, and he soon learned to get down on his all-fours and make Deacon Jones’ old horse ashamed of himself any day. The imitation was so perfect that Uncle John used to call in his friends to see the show, which consisted of Pete doing the racking act, while Little Sister, astraddle of his back, with one hand in his shirt collar and the other wielding a hickory switch, played the Deacon. One evening, as the company was taking in the performance, and Pete, now thoroughly leg-weary, had paced around for the twentieth time, Little Sister was seen to whack him in the flanks very vigorously and exclaim: “Come, pace along there, you son-of-a-gun, or I’ll put a head on you!”
Uncle John nearly fell out of his chair. Only a week before he had made that same remark to Pete for being a little slow about bringing in his shaving water. But he didn’t know that Little Sister had heard him.
The spring Little Sister was three years old the Colonel came in to breakfast one morning with a cloud on his brow. It was a great disappointment to him—old Betty, his saddle mare, the mare he had ridden for fifteen years, “the best bred mare in Tennessee,” had brought into the world a most unpromising offspring. “It is weak, puny and no ’count, John,” he said to his son; “deformed, or something, in its front legs, knuckles over and can’t stand up, the most infernally curby-legged thing I ever saw.”
“That’s too bad,” remarked Uncle John, as he helped himself to another battercake. “I’ll go out after breakfast and look at the poor little thing.”