quick eye she had for symptoms and ailments, and what a quick ear
for suffering, and how apt she was at picking up, remembering, and
inventing remedies. It never occurred to her not to crouch at the
head or the foot of a sick pallet, day and night through. As for the
nights, she said she dared not close her eyes of nights. The room they
were in was so vast, and sometimes the negroes lay so thick on the
floor, rolled in their blankets (you know, even in the summer they
sleep under blankets), all snoring so loudly, she would never have
heard a groan or a whimper any more than they did, if she had slept,
too. And negro mothers are so careless and such heavy sleepers. All
night she would creep at regular intervals to the different pallets,
and draw the little babies from under, or away from, the heavy, inert
impending mother forms. There is no telling how many she thus saved
from being overlaid and smothered, or, what was worse, maimed and
crippled.

Whenever a physician came in, as he was sometimes called, to look at
a valuable investment or to furbish up some piece of damaged goods,
she always managed to get near to hear the directions; and she
generally was the one to apply them also, for negroes always would
steal medicines most scurvily one from the other. And when death at
times would slip into the pen, despite the trader's utmost alertness
and precautions,--as death often "had to do," little Mammy said,--when
the time of some of them came to die, and when the rest of the
negroes, with African greed of eye for the horrible, would press
around the lowly couch where the agonizing form of a slave lay
writhing out of life, she would always to the last give medicines,
and wipe the cold forehead, and soothe the clutching, fearsome hands,
hoping to the end, and trying to inspire the hope that his or her
"time" had not come yet; for, as she said, "Our time doesn't come just