One morning Lou came running into the house almost breathless, with the
excited words that old mammy was dying in her cabin. They all of them
hastened to her bedside, and when she saw the old man kneeling upon the
floor, she put forth her mummied hand and left it rest upon his head.
"I's gwine tell de Lawd erbout de folks down yere," were her last words,
and from the woods they brought wild flowers and among them she slept,
black sentiment of a hallowed past--a past of slavery, but of love. More
than treasured heirlooms, of rusty swords which, once bright, had
flashed in gallant hands; more than tress of hair, tipped with gold and
ribbon-bound; more than old love-letters, books or fading picture of
serenest face--more than all else does the old black mother bind us to
the sunny days of yore. Beneath a tree, where at evening when the sun
was low often had she sat watching the cows as home they came from the
cane-breaks in the bottoms, they dug her grave; and from all about, from
fern-fringed coves and knobs where the scrub oak grew, the people came,
old men and women to pay their respects to this bit of another age,
going home--and the children, came wonderingly, curious, with pictures
of witches in their fertile minds.
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