"Pretty times these, indeed! very fine times, certainly!" exclaimed aunt Emma, with a most ominous shake of the head, and imitating, with great exactness, the tone, manner, and words of her deceased mistress, the first Mrs Thomas, whose representative and successor she seemed to consider herself to be, and equally bound to look out for the honor of the family, — "fine times these, aunt Dinah! that you and I, raised in one of the first families of Virginia, should have one of these good-for-nothing, no account, poor folks put over our heads, — and a Yankee too! O, aunt Dinah, who would a-thought it, that two quality niggers like you and I, raised in one of the first families of Virginia, and always accustomed to decent society, should have to take up with a Yankee mistress? What in heavens and earth could possess poor Massa Thomas, that, having once had such a wife as old mistress was, belonging to one of the first families of Virginia, he must needs go and bring home this little Yankee nobody, to disgrace us and him too?" Such was one of a great number of similar outbursts, which Cassy, and indeed Mrs Thomas herself, could hardly fail to overhear, since the discontented housekeeper made very little privacy of her griefs.
So far, indeed, did she carry it, that when the new Mrs Thomas, after being in the house for three or four weeks, intimated to aunt Emma her intention to assume in person the position of housekeeper, and called upon her to give up the keys, she snapped her fingers with significant contempt in the face of her new mistress, and absolutely refused. Her old mistress — no poor body, but born of one of the first families of Virginia — had brought her into Massa Thomas's family, and had made her housekeeper, and on her death bed had made her husband promise that he would never sell her, but that she always should be housekeeper; and housekeeper she meant to be in spite of all the Yankee women and poor white folks in creation.
