Then there was "Daddy Jacob," the nabob of the farm. Like "mammy" he was given just enough work to keep up appearances and keep him in practice. But it was usually special work, like presiding at the gin or hauling with the two-ox wagon. Many a meal has the little white boy eaten from old daddy's dinner bucket or from the blue-edged plates in his cabin. Then there was "Mandy," the young girl given by the parents to her young white mistress near her age. Mandy caught Miss Mary's manners, fell heir to her dresses and bonnets, waited on the table, joined the children in their sports, and felt that she was about as good as anybody. And she was, until the devil came along with the bayonets and brought the monster curse to the negro, the "Yankee school marm." These women were deluded, blind guides of the blind Africans. Reconstruction work has left the negro women, especially the young ones, the most giddy, most idle and aimless and the least virtuous of any set of women in any civilized country. The white Yankee school teachers sent down South by the thousands, forty years ago, sowed the seed of false notions of life and duty and opportunity, and the country is now afflicted with the harvest. "Jere" was the negro boy companion of young "Mars Henry." He and Mars Henry played marbles together, fished or swam the millpond, searched the woods for chinquapins or hickory nuts. They rode on the same lever at the old gin and leaped into the lint room together to pack back the loose cotton, and then mounted the mules and rode them to the barn. But the 'possum hunt was the glory of Henry and Jere's united life. After supper, in which Henry had swapped biscuit from the table for Jere's pork and roasted potatoes or sweet ash cake, they would put a few potatoes in their pockets, gather an axe, whistle up old "Tige," the dog, and were soon away in the woods. When the game was captured, and a failure was a rare thing, with the nocturnal Nimrods, a small short hickory pole was split and the tail of the 'possum inserted in the crack and soon each boy had a 'possum pole on his shoulder. But a boy gets sleepy quickly. Worn out with their ramble they would rake up a pile of leaves on the south side of a big log, kindle a fire near their feet and put the potatoes to roasting. "Tige" knew what it all meant and he enjoyed the camping too. He would lie next to the 'possums so that he could keep an eye on them. (The writer's Tige had but one eye.) A 'possum is the meekest of all animals, when you get his tail in a vice and a dog in three feet of him. Jere would lie next to Tige, close enough to get some of his warmth, and Mars Henry would lie close to Jere. With their feet to the fire they got a few hours of the sweetest sleep the world ever gave. It was Mars Henry's active, rollicking, rough and tumble open-air life with Jere that gave such vigor, in camp and on the march, to the Confederate soldier.