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The old cemetery in Hyndsville, unlike the newer one in which folks take a sort of ghastly pride, one lot differing from another lot in glory, is an unpretentious place, enclosed by crumbling walls, the iron gates of which have rusted ajar.
And after I have taken Hynds House, what of you? What do you get?" "I get out," I said briefly. And a horrid qualm came over me. Leave Hynds House, forever? Go away from Hyndsville, leaving this friendlier, pleasanter, happier life behind? "You are forgetting my training," I reminded him, trying to keep my voice steady. "I can always do what I did before I came here.
"Ah, yes, the statue, brought from Italy by Richard Hynds, a great grandfather of his. Did he tell you anything about Richard?" asked the judge. "Nothing." "I shall have to go a long way back, more than a hundred years, to make you understand," said the judge. "When I was a boy some of the oldest folk here in Hyndsville used to say that Hynds House never should have come to Freeman Hynds, Mrs.
Miss Hopkins's stare dismissed me, shifted to Alicia, and discovered the cause of this shameless surrender of family pride. Her lips tightened. With politely cold hopes that we should like Hyndsville, and warmer hopes that we would join the missionary society, they left us. "Wedge Number One: The poor dear heathen, Sophy!" smiled Alicia.
"And may Sekhet the Cat of the Sun aid me, a devotee at her shrine, to butter the paws of some two-legged cats in Hyndsville!" "You-all's dinnah 's waitin'." Mary Magdalen stubbornly held to the notion that any meal eaten between breakfast and night was dinner; lunch being sandwiches and fried chicken taken out of a basket at church picnics and eaten out of one's hand, or lap, for choice.
I fancy that the Witch of Endor's neighbors must have had just such an opinion of her as these Hyndsville folk had of Great-Aunt Sophronisba. South Carolina people always talk in terms of three generations. When they say something about you, they remember something about your mother or your grandfather at the same time, and they tell that, too.
Chewed, frayed, and torn, it had once been of finest red Morocco leather; and it was such a flat and heelless slipper as no native Hyndsville foot had ever worn. It was The Jinnee's slipper. Mrs. Cheshire Scarboro was far from the fool her cousin Sophronisba had credited her with being. She had sufficient cleverness to understand that Hyndsville wasn't big enough to hold two factions.
And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her gaunt old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as well; where they referred to her, succinctly, as "the Scarlet Witch." I heard from her directly only once, and that was the year she sent me a red flannel petticoat for a Christmas present.
If it had been humanly possible for Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett to lug her place in Hyndsville, South Carolina, along with her into the next world, plump it squarely in the middle of the Elysian Fields, plaster it over with "No Trespassing" signs, and then settle herself down to a blissful eternity of serving writs upon the angels for flying over her fences without permission, and setting the saved by the ears in general, she would have done so and felt that heaven was almost as desirable a place as South Carolina.
"Judge Gatchell sent them to me this morning," she explained, with an October blush. For the sallow old jurist had taken so great a liking to the Boston reincarnation of a Theban vestal, and was in consequence so rejuvenated, himself, that all Hyndsville was holding up the hands of astonishment and biting the finger of conjecture.
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