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The Voice of the People by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
page 56 of 433 (12%)
gaze often wandered past the huge sycamore to the family graveyard,
where rank periwinkle grew and mocking-birds nested. Through the long
summer not a Sunday passed that he did not take fresh flowers to one of
the neatly trimmed mounds where the marble headpiece read:

"AMELIA TUCKER,

BELOVED WIFE OF

THOMAS BATTLE,

DIED APRIL 3RD., 18--.

'_I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith
the Lord._'"

Sometimes the children were with him, but usually he went alone, and
once or twice he returned with red eyelids and asked for a julep.

There was little to fill his life now, and he divided it between Bernard
and Eugenia, whom he adored, and the negroes, whom he reviled for
diversion and spoiled to make amends.

"They will break me!" he would declare a dozen times a day. "They will
turn me out of house and home. Here's old Sambo's Claudius come back and
moved into the quarters. He hasn't a cent to his name, and he's the most
no 'count scamp on earth. It's worse than before the war--upon my soul
it is! Then they lived on me and I got an odd piece of work out of
them. Now they live on me and don't do a damned lick!"

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