Old Stories 259
mrs. stowe’s oranges
It is said that the year after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” came out, all the oranges that grew in her Florida grove were black skinned. There was a good deal of joking in consequence, and the fruit was spoken of as “abolition oranges.”
stumping the devil
There was a place where my mother was livin’ once, where the whoopin’-cough took and run through the family. It ketched ’em all, little and big, except the hired man, who might have been eighteen or twenty years old.
One day my mother says to him, “Ain't you goin' to have the whoopin'-cough, John?”
And he says, “No; I'll stump the Devil to give it to me.”
The next thing they knew, John had the whooping-cough, and had it bad. It made him so cross-eyed that you might think he was lookin' all around the lots when he was lookin' straight at you. He never could talk straight after it, and he couldn't walk straight. He kind o' petered out every way. He was a smart,
