“You know, Mis’ Dolly,” said Serena, “after you told me I ought to take boarders an’ git pay fer keepin’ folks, I thought ef there was anybody in the world I ought to take it was pore little Viny. She’s goin’ to give me five dollars a week, an’ she ain’t a bit of trouble only ever’ other day when she has her spell. Hit comes on around one o’clock an’ stays till about five, jest four hours is all it is, an’ I don’t have to do anything but set by her an’ rub her, an’ keep her from bitin’ me when the pain gits so bad she’s out an’ out crazy.” “Serena, are you telling me that you can sit by her and hear her scream like that for four hours?” “Her mother done it fer twenty year, an’ it wuz harder fer her than fer me. Somebody’s got to take keer of her, an’ Uncle Mace is mighty nigh dead over it. He kain’t hold out like a woman. Five dollars a week’ll hep us a lot. You can git them cloaks you wanted fer the childern, now I’ve got a way to pay you. Ef I can earn it adoin’ what the Lord tells us is our duty, I’m glad o’ the chaince. ’Fore you make up your mind about it, Mis’ Dolly, I want you to come an’ see Viny. Come when she’s feelin’ good, so you can get acquainted. The young-uns are plum foolish about her, an’ I kain’t keep ’em off her bed.” “Where _is_ her bed, Serena?” “It’s in the corner by the fireplace. It scrouges us a little, but Len fixed a bench at the foot o’ the bed, an’ the childern set on that an’ keep warm. There wuzn’t room fer Viny’s bed ’twixt mine and the girls’. Viny is shore sociable an’s been wonderin’ when you’ll come to see her. She can crochet the purtiest, an’ gits money fer it, but Uncle Mace don’t know it. Her mother left her a hundred dollars, all in five-dollar gold pieces, that she’d saved up aslippin’ eggs to the store, an’ sellin’ off chickens quiet, an’ makin’ rugs fer them summer folks at Carson. She told Viny to git more ef she could, an’ go to the hospital with it. Uncle Mace never would hear to her goin’, an’ that’s why Viny won’t tell him about the money. He says she’ll never come back alive, an’ he’s agin the hospital awful. He b’lieves the devil gits inter pore innercent Viny to punish him fer some meanness he done onct, an’ he says God will drive it out in His own time. I told him it looked like God would ’a’ put it in him ’stead o’ Viny, an’ he said it hurt him worse fer Viny to have it, an’ he had to work, bein’ a man. ‘You’re too old to work now,’ I told him, ‘an’ maybe if you prayed hard, the Lord would put it inter you an’ let Viny off fer a while,’ but he said it wuz best to let God work it out in his own way. Viny, though, she kinder wants to try the hospital, an’ that’s why she won’t tell him about the money. You’ll take to the pore little thing soon as you look at her, Mis’ Dolly. Len said the day Uncle Mace brought her up the mountain that we ought to go an’ see you first, but I told him I’d lived by you long enough to know what you’d say ’thout askin’.”