If I couldn't make cotton-sacks on it, what was the use of
having it?
Charlie had informed me that he would send me down seven or eight women
from the quarters to make the sacks. I informed him with a flourish that I
should need but one: I should want her to cut the sacks out. Charlie
thanked me, and Martha and I and "Wheeler & Wilson" made the sacks.
Was I to blame that the wretched things burst in twenty places at once the
first time they were used? Was I to blame that two women were kept busy
mending my sacks until they ceased to be sacks? Charlie might think so,
but I did not.
He reported the failure of my cotton-sack experiment with very unbecoming
levity, as it struck me, accompanying his report with a somewhat unjust
comment upon new-fangled notions, such as sewing-machines, etc., etc.,
winding up with--"Now, when mother was alive" (I fairly winced), "the
house was not considered too good for the darkies to sit on the back
gallery with their work and make the sacks right under mother's
eye--sewing them with good strong thread, too, that was spun for the
purpose. I can remember the old spinning-wheel: it used to sit right at
that end of the gallery."
Like Captain Cuttle, I "made a note of it" for future use.
I often had occasion to wonder, during the early years of my married life,
how it happened that the son of such an exceptionally perfect woman as I
was compelled to presume my respected mother-in-law to have been, should
have grown up with such shockingly disorderly habits as had my Charlie.
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