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

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A. “Well, Peter, you were going to talk about holydays, and I shouldn’t think it much of a holyday to be ‘tuned with them sprouts.’”

P. “Oh! yis, Sir, we had great times every Christmas and New-Years; but we thought the most of Sain’t Valentine’s Day. The boys and gals of the whole neighborhood, used to git together, and carry on, and make fun, and sich like. We used to play pin a good deal, and I and John used to go snacks, and cheat like Sancho Panza; and there’s where we got the pins to stick in the calf’s nose, I was tellin’ you on. We used to have a good deal of fun sometimes in bilein eggs. Mistress would send us out to hunt eggs, and we’d find a nest of a dozen, likely, and only carry in three or four, and lay the rest by for holydays. Well, we used to bile eggs, as I was sayin’, and the boys would strike biled eggs together, and the one that didn’t get his egg broke should have t’other’s, for his’n was the best egg. Well, we got a contrivance, I and John did, that brought us a fine bunch of eggs. John’s uncle was down the country once, and he gin John a smooth marble egg: oh! ’twas a dreadful funny thing, and I guess he’s got it yit, if he’s a livin’—well, we kept this egg, year in, and year out, and we’d take it to the holydays, and break all the eggs there, and carry home a nice parcel, and have a good bunch to give away, and I guess as how the boys never found it out.”