However, in the course of time the slow rolling of our carriage became monotonous to the restive children of the caravan, and the novelty of standing at the windows and gazing over the lifting hills soon wore off. My aunt felt the fatigue less, we thought, for she was a famous soliloquist, and often talked to herself as we rode, sometimes laughing aloud at her own good company. I think we children regarded her as deranged, if harmless, until one day she proved her sanity to our complete satisfaction. In a moment of insupportable tedium we conceived the idea of dropping the little tin cups, with which each was provided, in order to see if the wheels would run over them. One after another the vessels were lowered, and each, to our intense delight, was smashed flat as the proverbial pancake. When my aunt discovered our mischief, being a gentle soul, she merely reprimanded us, and at the next settlement purchased others; but when these and yet others followed the fate of the first, she became less indulgent. Switches were cut from the forest trees, three pairs of pink palms tingled with the punishment then and there administered, and the remembrance thereof restrained my cousins’ and my own destructiveness for the remainder of the journey. Arrived at Tuscaloosa, I spent four years in the shelter of the motherly affection of my aunt, Mrs. Collier, when, her health failing, I was placed in the home of my mother’s brother, Alfred Battle, a wealthy planter, residing a day’s journey from the little capital. My recollections of that early Alabama life centre themselves about a great white house set in widening grounds, in the midst of which was a wondrous sloe-tree, white with blooms. Many times I and my cousins played under it by moonlight, watching the shadows of the branches as they trembled on the white-sanded earth below, wondering at them, and not sure whether they were fairies’ or angels’ or witches’ shapes. Around that tree, too, we played “Chickamy, Chickamy, Craney Crow,” and, at the climax, “What o’clock, Old Witch?” would scamper wildly to elude the pursuit of the imaginary old witch. Here, a healthy and happy child, I pursued my studies. My uncle’s wife, a woman of marked domestic tastes, taught me to sew and knit and to make a buttonhole, and I made progress in books under the guidance of a visiting teacher; but, my task ended, I flew to the meadows and orchards and to the full-flowering clover-field, or to the plantation nursery to see the old mammies feed the babies with “clabber,” with bread well crumbed in it, or _cush_, made of bread soaked in gravy and softly mashed.