The moments just preceding bedtime, in which we were undergoing the process of disrobing at the hands of Mammy, were periods of dreadful pleasure to us. As I look back upon them, I wonder that we got any sleep at all after some of her recitals. They were not always sanguinary or ghostly, and of course when I scan them in the light of later years, it is apparent that Mammy, like the majority of people, “without regard to color or previous condition of servitude,” suffered her walk and conversation to be influenced by her state of health, mental and bodily. Her walk--I am afraid I must admit, as all biographers seem privileged to deal with the frailties of their victims as freely as with their virtues--her walk, viewed through the medium already alluded to, did not owe its occasional uncertainty to “very coarse veins,” though that malady, with a slight phonetic difference, Mammy undoubtedly suffered from, in common with the facts. She was a great believer in “dram” as a remedial agent, and homoeopathic practice was unknown with us at that period. Mammy's code of laws for our moral government was one of threats of being “repoated to ole mahster,” tempered by tea of her own making dulcified by brown sugar of fascinating sweetness, anecdote, and autobiography. The anecdotal part consisted almost exclusively of the fascinating répertoire of Uncle Remus. Indeed, to know the charm of that chronicle is reserved to the man or woman whose childhood dates from the _ante bellum_ period, and who had a Mammy. In the autobiographical part Mammy spread us a chilling feast of horrors, varied by the supernatural. Long years after this period I read a protest in some Southern paper against this practice in the nursery, with its manifest consequences on the minds of children. It set me to wondering how it was that the consequences in my day seemed inappreciable. I do not understand it now. Some of Mammy's stories would have been bonanzas to a police reporter of today; others would have bred emulation in Edgar Poe. And yet I do not recall any subsequent terrors. An account of the execution of some pirates, which she had witnessed when a “gal,” was popular. She had a rhyme which condensed the details. The condemned were Spaniards: Pepe hung, Qulo fell, Felix died and went to ---- Mammy always gave the rhyme with awful emphasis. She had had an experience before coming into our family, by purchase, which gave her easy precedence over all the mammies of all our friends. To be sure, it was an experience which the other mammies, as “good membahs of de chutch,” regarded as unholy; one which they congratulated themselves would never lie on their consciences, and of which poor Mammy was to die unshriven in their minds; for she never became a “sister,” so far as I ever learned.