1 "COME in," says the woman, and I did.
2 The woman kept looking at me pretty curious, and I didn't feel a bit comfortable.
3 So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes.
4 I wished the woman would say something more; the longer she set still the uneasier I was.
5 There was a woman about forty year old in there knitting by a candle that was on a pine table.
6 When the woman stopped talking I looked up, and she was looking at me pretty curious and smiling a little.
7 Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women.
8 Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold.
9 The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.
10 But if this woman had been in such a little town two days she could tell me all I wanted to know; so I knocked at the door, and made up my mind I wouldn't forget I was a girl.
11 I'll stuff Jim's clothes full of straw and lay it on his bed to represent his mother in disguise, and Jim 'll take the nigger woman's gown off of me and wear it, and we'll all evade together.'
12 Well, the woman fell to talking about how hard times was, and how poor they had to live, and how the rats was as free as if they owned the place, and so forth and so on, and then I got easy again.
13 And behind the woman comes a little nigger girl and two little nigger boys without anything on but tow-linen shirts, and they hung on to their mother's gown, and peeped out from behind her at me, bashful, the way they always do.
14 And here comes the white woman running from the house, about forty-five or fifty year old, bareheaded, and her spinning-stick in her hand; and behind her comes her little white children, acting the same way the little niggers was doing.
15 Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it; that's the way a woman most always does, but a man always does t'other way.