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Updated: June 11, 2025
This pretence of ill-humor was kept up until the wagon was well out of sight from the street and driven up under a shed close by the kitchen-door, when poor old Maum Winnie came up close and whispered, "Is you brung Mars Ned shure 'nuff? Oh, whar he? tell Winnie whar he!" Just then the two ladies stole out from the house and came close to the wagon.
Marshall had withdrawn for a moment's rest from the fatigue of watching and nursing. Her slumber was soon broken, however, by Maum Isbel, who, unceremoniously thrusting her head into her chamber, said in an excited tone: "Miss Lizzie! Miss Lizzie! Mis' Moses says she would like to see you at once. She seem werry bad to me, ma'am, werry bad indeed; she's so weak!"
By this time the two girls were standing in front of the well-known fruit-stall of the old blind colored woman known far and near through the Queen City as "Maum Cinda." For years, hers had been the important market for supplying the school-children with luscious fruits, unimpeachable taffy, and ground-pea candy.
And Peter was always making pictures of them Mindel at the wash-tub, Emma Campbell picking a chicken, old Maum' Chloe churning, Liza playing with her fat black baby, Joe Tuttle plowing, old Daddy Neptune Fennick leaning on his ax.
Immediately Maum Winnie would appear, the very picture of dignified astonishment, "Now, Miss Nelly, ain't you 'shame'? Yer pore mar she bin had a mity onrestless night, an' jes' as she 'bout to ketch a nap o' sleep, yere you bin start all dis 'fusion. Now, her eye dun pop wide open, an' she gwine straight to studyin' agin."
Maum Isbel sighed, and dropped a tear at these ominous words; and then she shambled along into ward number two, to inspect the washing that Mark Antony Briggs, a colored man of her acquaintance, was doing there. There she grew garrulous over the demerits of the work, and soon forgot her emotion and her sympathy for the invalid. In the meantime, Mrs.
Doors, log fireplaces, etc., had been torn down for firewood, and in many places patches of charred wood, or dead embers, showed where camp-fires had been lighted. The little garden in front of Maum Winnie's cabin, made and carefully tended by "de ole man," was a wilderness of weeds among which flowers of rank growth still struggled for a place.
This Washing Trade of hers, however, which she carried on for the King and Merchants' ships that were in Harbour, and for nearly all the rich Merchants and Traders of Kingston, brought Maum Buckey in a very pretty penny; and not only was her tub commerce a brisk ready-money business, but she had two flourishing plantations one for the growing of Coffee, and the other of Sugar near the town of Savannah de la Mar.
I was full of glee at the prospects of this Foray, vowed that it was a hundred times pleasanter than making out Maum Buckey's washing-books, and hearing her scold her laundry-wenches; and longed to prove to my companions that the Prowess I had shown at twelve ay, and before that age, when I brained the Grenadier with the Demijohn had not degenerated now that I was turned sixteen, and far away from my own country.
I did not fail to express my gratitude to the hospitable Planter and his Lady, and I gave the Nurse Cubjack half a dollar and a silver tobacco-stopper that had been presented to me by Maum Buckey. As a perverse destiny would have it, this Tobacco-stopper, this harmless trinket, was the very means of my losing my situation, and parting in anger from my Pumpkin-faced Patroness.
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