Uncle Tom’s Cabin

tables, and make the ordinary confusion sevenfold more confounded. Then she would light her pipe, and leisurely go over her arrangements, looking things over, and discoursing upon them; making all the young fry scour most vigorously on the tin things, and keeping up for several hours a most energetic state of confusion, which she would explain to the satisfaction of all inquirers, by the remark that she was a “clarin’ up.” “She couldn’t hev things a gwine on so as they had been, and she was gwine to make these yer young ones keep better order;” for Dinah herself, somehow, indulged the illusion that she, herself, was the soul of order, and it was only the young uns, and the everybody else in the house, that were the cause of anything that fell short of perfection in this respect. When all the tins were scoured, and the tables scrubbed snowy white, and everything that could offend tucked out of sight in holes and corners, Dinah would dress herself up in a smart dress, clean apron, and high, brilliant Madras turban, and tell all marauding “young uns” to keep out of the kitchen, for she was gwine to have things kept nice. Indeed, these periodic seasons were often an inconvenience to the whole household; for Dinah would contract such an immoderate attachment to her scoured tin, as to insist upon it that it shouldn’t be used again for any possible purpose⁠—at least, till the ardor of the “clarin’ up” period abated.

Miss Ophelia, in a few days, thoroughly reformed every department of the house to a systematic pattern; but her labors in all departments that depended on the cooperation of servants were like those of Sisyphus or the Danaides. In despair, she one day appealed to St. Clare.

“There is no such thing as getting anything like a system in this family!”

“To be sure, there isn’t,” said St. Clare.

“Such shiftless management, such waste, such confusion, I never saw!”

“I dare say you didn’t.”

“You would not take it so coolly, if you were housekeeper.”

“My dear cousin, you may as well understand, once for all, that we masters are divided into two classes, oppressors and oppressed. We who are good-natured and hate severity make up our minds to a good deal of inconvenience. If we will keep a shambling, loose, untaught set in the community, for our convenience, why, we must take the consequence. Some rare cases I have seen, of persons, who, by a peculiar tact, can produce order and system without severity; but I’m not one of them⁠—and so I made up my mind, long ago, to let things go just as they do. I will not have the poor devils thrashed and cut to pieces, and they know it⁠—and, of course, they know the staff is in their own hands.”

“But to have no time, no place, no order⁠—all going on in this shiftless way!”

“My dear Vermont, you natives up by the North Pole set an extravagant value on time! What on earth is the use of time to a fellow who has twice as much of it as he knows what to do with? As to order and system, where there is nothing to be done but to lounge on the sofa and read, an hour sooner or later in breakfast or dinner isn’t of much account. Now, there’s Dinah gets you a capital dinner⁠—soup, ragout, roast fowl, dessert, ice-creams and all⁠—and she creates it all out of chaos and old night down there, in that kitchen. I think it really sublime, the way she manages. But, Heaven bless us! if we are to go down there, and view all the smoking and squatting about, and hurryscurryation of the preparatory process, we should never eat more! My good cousin, absolve yourself from that! It’s more than a Catholic penance, and does no more good. You’ll only lose your own temper, and utterly confound Dinah. Let her go her own way.”

“But, Augustine, you don’t know how I found things.”

“Don’t I? Don’t I know that the rolling-pin is under her bed, and the nutmeg-grater in her pocket with her tobacco⁠—that there are sixty-five different sugar-bowls, one in every hole in the house⁠—that she washes dishes with a dinner-napkin one day, and with a fragment of an old petticoat the next? But the upshot is, she gets up glorious dinners, makes superb coffee; and you must judge her as warriors and statesmen are judged, by her success.”

“But the waste⁠—the expense!”

“O, well! Lock everything you can, and keep the key. Give out by driblets, and never inquire for odds and ends⁠—it isn’t best.”

“That troubles me, Augustine. I can’t help feeling as if these servants were not strictly honest. Are you sure they can be relied on?”

Augustine laughed immoderately at the grave and anxious face with which Miss Ophelia propounded the question.

“O, cousin, that’s too good⁠—honest!⁠—as if that’s a thing to be expected! Honest!⁠—why, of course, they arn’t. Why should they be? What upon earth is to make them so?”

“Why don’t you instruct?”

“Instruct! O, fiddlestick! What instructing do you think I should do? I look like it! As to Marie, she has spirit enough, to be sure, to kill off a whole plantation, if I’d let her manage; but she wouldn’t get the cheatery out of them.”

“Are there no honest ones?”

“Well, now and then one, whom Nature makes so impracticably simple, truthful and faithful, that the worst possible influence can’t destroy it. But, you see, from the mother’s breast the colored child feels and sees that there are none but underhand ways open to it. It can get along no other way with its parents, its mistress, its young master and missie playfellows. Cunning and deception become necessary, inevitable habits. It isn’t fair to expect anything else of him. He ought not to be punished for it. As to honesty, the slave is kept in that dependent, semi-childish state, that there is no making him realize the rights of property, or feel that his master’s goods are not his own,