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Children were clinging to the skirts of their mothers, who had come to town either as witnesses or for the holiday. One woman was quieting a crying baby with the gag that a baby never refuses. She herself was soothed by the snuff-stick that protruded from the space left vacant by the early decay of her two front teeth.
There's nobody else to claim her, he tells me, and so I'll claim her. There's enough of me to take care of her, and I mean to do it." It was so extraordinary a sensation, that for a few moments there was another silence, broken as before by Mrs. Doty. "Waal," she remarked, removing her snuff-stick and expectorating into the fire.
At length she leaned a bit to one side, reached into a pocket and, taking out a snuff-stick and a parcel of its attendant compound, began to take a dip of snuff, after the habit of certain of the population of that region. This done, she turned with a swift jerk of the head, bringing to bear the tube of her bonnet in full force upon her lord and master.
There were two persons in the single room the cabin contained a little, dried-up woman who sat in a low rocking-chair in front of the fire with a dingy snuff-stick between her toothless gums, and one of Beardsley's negro girls who had come over to "slick up things." "How do you find yourself this fine morning, mother?" said Tom familiarly.
At once the strain was taken up on every side, the notes swelled, Uncle Jimmie clapped hands in time, and at the third line a mountain woman in the gallery, sitting with her sun-bonnet pulled down over her sore eyes, changed a snuff-stick from her mouth to her pocket, burst into a heart-freezing scream, and began to thrash about in her seat. The hymn rolled on in stronger volume.
She was a tall, angular creature, the mother of fifteen, comprising in their number three sets of twins. She held her snuff-stick between her teeth and the child on her lap, with an easy professional air. "I hain't never had to raise none o' mine by hand since Martin Luther," she remarked. "I've been mighty glad on it, for he was a sight o' trouble. Kinder colicky and weakly.
"If she aint," responded the other, putting a peeled snuff-stick into her cheek, "then her husband's got the brass buttons, and they knows that. Look at 'er a-smi-i-ilin'!" "What you reckon makes her look so wore out?" asked the first.
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