Читать книгу Chains and Freedom: or, The Life and Adventures of Peter Wheeler, a Colored Man Yet Living онлайн

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A. “Why, Peter, you’ve made the same remark about her, that a famous historian makes about Charles Second, a wicked king of England. Some of the king’s friends said, the Grace of God brought him to the throne—this historian said, “if it brought him to the throne it forsook him very soon after he got there.”

A. “Did you have any fun holydays, Peter.”

P. “Oh! yis, I and John used to be ‘mazing thick, and always together, and always in mischief——One time, I recollect, when master was gone away, we cut up a curious dido; master had a calf that was dreadful gentle, and I and John takes him, and puts a rope round his neck, and pulls his nose through the fence, and drove it full of pins, and he blatted and blatted like murder, and finally mistress see us, and out she come, and makes us pull all the pins out, one by one, and let him go; she didn’t say much, but goes and cuts a parcel of sprouts, and I concluded she was a goin’ to tune us. But it come night, we went into the house, and she was mighty good, and says she, ‘come boys, I guess it’s about bed time;’ and so she hands us a couple of basins of samp and milk, and we eat it, and off to bed, a chucklin’, to think we’d got off as well as we had. But we’d no sooner got well to bed, and nicely kivered up, when I see a light comin’ up stairs, and mistress was a holdin’ the candle in one hand, and a bunch of sprouts in t’other; and she comes up to the bed, and says she, ‘boys do you sleep warm? I guess I’ll tuck you up a little warmer, and, at that, she off with every rag of bed clothes, and if she didn’t tune us, I miss my guess: and ‘now,’ says she, ‘John see that you be in better business next time, when your dad’s gone; and you nigger, you good for nothin little rascal, you make a pincushion of a calf’s nose agin, will ye?’ And I tell ye they set close, them ’ere sprouts.”