" It was a
long, two-story frame building, that had once been inhabited by genteel
people. Why they ever built it in that shape, or why they daubed it with
yellow paint, is more than I can tell. But it had gone out of fashion,
and now it was, as the boys expressed it, "seedy." Old hats and old
clothes filled many of the places once filled by glass. Into one room of
this row Mr. Blake entered, saying:
"How are you, Aunt Parm'ly?"
"Howd'y, Mr. Blake, howd'y! I know'd you was a-comin', honey, fer I
hyeard the sound of yer cane afore you come in. I'm mis'able these yer
days, thank you. I'se got a headache, an' a backache, and a toothache in
de boot."
I suppose the poor old colored woman meant to say that she had a
toothache "to boot."
"You see, Mr. Blake, Jane's got a little sumpin to do now, and we can git
bread enough, thank the Lord, but as fer coal, that's the hardest of all.
We has to buy it by the bucketful, and that's mighty high at fifteen
cents a bucket. An' pears like we couldn't never git nothin' ahead on
account of my roomatiz. Where de coal's to come from dis ere winter I
don't know, cep de good Lord sends it down out of the sky; and I reckon
stone-coal don't never come dat dar road.
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