Page:Southern Life in Southern Literature.djvu/81

Rh action that drove an additional supply of blood into his face. It was apparent that the old gentleman had got much beyond the depth of his hearers and was pouring out his rhetoric more from oratorical vanity than from any hope of enlightening his audience. At the most animated part of his strain he brought himself, by a kind of climax, to the identical sentiment uttered by Meriwether the day before. He warned his young hearers—the oldest of them was not above fourteen—"to keep a lynx-eyed gaze upon that serpentlike ambition which would convert the government at Washington into Aaron's rod, to swallow up the independence of their native state."

This conceit immediately ran through all the lower circles at Swallow Barn. Mr. Tongue, the overseer, repeated it at the blacksmith's shop in the presence of the blacksmith and Mr. Absalom Bulrush, a spare, ague-and-feverish husbandman who occupies a muddy slip of marshland on one of the river bottoms, which is now under a mortgage to Meriwether; and from these it has spread far and wide, though a good deal diluted, until in its circuit it has reached our veteran groom Carey, who considers the sentiment as importing something of an awful nature. With the smallest encouragement, Carey will put on a tragi-comic face, shake his head very slowly, turn up his eyeballs, and open out his broad, scaly hands, while he repeats with labored voice, "Look out, Master Ned! Aaron's rod a black snake in Old Virginny!" Upon which, as we fall into a roar of laughter, Carey stares with astonishment at our irreverence. But having been set to acting this scene for us once or twice, he now suspects us of some joke and asks "if there isn't a copper for an old negro," which if he succeeds in getting, he runs off, telling us "he is too 'cute to make a fool of himself."

Meriwether does not dislike this trait in the society around him. I happened to hear two carpenters one day, who were,