“Little Miss,” still sweet and dainty in her dimity, smiles over her netting and slips the beads upon the scarlet threads or sorts her crewels in the shady porch, for at the other end, just out of sight, the old split-bottomed hickory chair resumes its familiar “thump” to the music of a negro voice. Again it is “the dark of the moon,” and Satan is abroad in the “Quarters,” and the good hoodoo who must beat the devil at his own game is working wonders against him as he “splits the wind.” “Ole Cinder Cat” sits by the hearth nightly, and the “devil’s little fly” buzzes audibly in wondering childish ears. The same old stories, ever witching, ever new, to the same old chorus—“Tell another, Mammy!” * * * * * Another chorus calls to answering silence, for she is gone. The swaying form, crooning in low rich voice, like some bronze Homer blind to letters, a weird primeval lore into the ears of future orators, is shut within the feudal past of the old plantation days, for the brown breast that pillowed its brain and beauty is still forever, and that South too is dead. The worn split-bottomed chair is empty, filled with dust and years, for it is we who seek to conjure with it now—we who have heard unwitting at that shrine a classic that America may call her own. OLD CINDER CAT Solon and Juno had quarrelled. Now a quarrel was not an unusual occurrence in the Quarters, but Solon and Juno had been exemplars of conjugal felicity for nearly eighteen years, and had been held up to their dusky world as patterns to be zealously copied. This unpleasantness, however, had been brewing for a long time; but hitherto, if one had lost temper, the other had always prudently remembered that they were in the fierce light that beats upon all paragons, and wisely refrained from adding to the flame. But at last there was a culmination behind closed doors, and when Solon and Juno arose at daylight neither had yielded a single point. The most mortifying part of the whole proceeding to Solon was the fact that he had just “experienced religion,” and this disgraceful thing coming close upon the second week was certainly a most painful “falling from grace,” and he groaned in spirit lest the news should be noised abroad. Juno, however, had no such qualms of conscience, for, though she went to “meeting” persistently, her service was of the even, regular variety, and as she was never known to shout, and had never “come under conviction,” ’Zorter Blalock, newly come into that fold, took her under especial consideration, and prayed nightly for “dem needer hot, needer cole, les’ dey be spit outen de mouf, O Lord!” Juno raised no question as to the genuineness of Solon’s religion; but she had her own grievance against him; for in her old age Juno had grown jealous; and at last, from much dwelling upon some recent occurrences simultaneous with Solon’s profession, Juno had become suspicious.