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4 and by Juba, who was just beginning his apprenticeship by carrying relays of the eternal battercakes from the kitchen to the dining-room. And the next moment, Miss Jemima, the Colonel's sister and double, actually danced into the room with her gray curls flying, and gasped, "Brother, the Yankees are coming!"

"Are they, my dear Jemima?" remarked the Colonel, rising. "Then we must prepare to meet them with all the dignity and composure possible." As the Colonel opened the door, his own man, Dad Davy, nearly ran over him, blurting out the startling news, "Marse, de Yankees is comin'!" and the same information was screeched at him by every negro, big and little, on the plantation who had known it in time to make a bee-line for the house.

"Disperse to your usual occupations," cried the Colonel, waving his hand majestically. The negroes dispersed, not to their business, but with the African's natural love of a sensation to spread the alarm all over the place. By the time it got to the "quarters,"—the houses of the field-hands, farthest away from "de gret house,"—it was reported that Dad Davy had told Tom Battercake that he saw Aunt Tulip "runnin' outen de gret house, and the Yankees wuz hol'in er pistol at ole Marse' hade, and