"My position in life! I don't see what that has to do with it. My position in life enables me to do anything I please—a liberty which I take pretty generally. And, then, really, I couldn't help feeling rather sadly about it, because that Old Tiff, there (I believe that's his name), told me that the woman had been of a good Virginia family. Very likely she may have been just such another wild girl as I am, and thought as little about bad times, and of dying, as I do. So I couldn't help feeling sad for her. It really came over me when I was walking in the garden. Such a beautiful morning as it was—the birds all singing, and the dew all glittering and shining on the flowers! Why, aunt, the flowers really seemed alive; it seemed as though I could hear them breathing, and hear their hearts beating like mine. And, all of a sudden, I heard the most wild, mournful singing, over in the woods. It wasn't anything very beautiful, you know, but it was so wild, and strange! 'She is dead and gone to heaven!—she is dead and gone to heaven!' And pretty soon I saw the funniest old wagon—I don't know what to call it—and this queer old black man in it, with an old white hat and surtout on, and a pair of great, funny-looking spectacles on his nose. I went to the fence to see who he was; and he came up and spoke to me, made the most respectful bow—you ought to have seen it! And then, poor fellow, he told me how his mistress was lying dead, with the children around her, and nobody in the house! The poor old creature, he actually cried, and I felt so for him! He seemed to be proud of his dead mistress, in spite of her poverty."

"Where do they live?" said Mrs. Nesbit.

"Why, he told me over in the pine woods, near the swamp."

"Oh," said Mrs. Nesbit, "I dare say it's that Cripps family, that's squatted in the pine woods. A most miserable set—all of them liars and thieves! If I had known who it was, I'm sure I shouldn't have let Milly go over. Such families oughtn't to be encouraged; there oughtn't a thing to be done for them; we shouldn't encourage them to stay in the neighborhood. They always will steal from off the plantations, and corrupt the negroes, and get drunk, and everything else that's bad. There's never a woman of decent character among them, that ever I heard of; and, if you were my daughter, I shouldn't let you go near them."

"Well, I'm not your daughter, thank fortune!" said Nina, whose graces always rapidly declined in controversies with her aunt, "and so I shall do as I please. And I don't know what you pious people talk so for; for Christ went with publicans and sinners, I'm sure."