Ridge has been cut off by that pile of stones to house the singing of
psalms?" And as I raged I had a feeling of being relentlessly
pursued--by something I didn't understand.

"Madam," returned father, with a dignity he always used with me when he
encountered one of my rages, "you will find that the chapel does not in
any way interfere with Nickols' carefully planned view. Gregory Goodloe
spent many days of thought in seeking to place it so that it would not
intrude itself upon your garden, and he built his parsonage completely
out of view, though it gives him only one large southern window to his
study and only northern ones to his bedroom."

"Does the creature also sleep and eat and have his being right there
behind my hollyhocks?" I demanded, and my rage began to merge into
actual grief, which in turn threatened to come to the surface in hot
tears.

"Now, Charlotte, my daughter," father was beginning to say with soothing
in his voice instead of the belligerence that from my youth up had
always just preceded my floods of tears. Dabney, the shriveled black
butler, who had always devotedly sympathized with my exhibitions of
temperament, to which he had, from my infancy, given the name of
"tantrums," set the platter of fried chicken before father's place at
the damask and silver-spread old table by the window, through which the
morning sun was shining genially. Then, with a smile as broad and genial
as that of the sun, he drew out my chair from behind the ancestral
silver coffee urn, which was puffing out clouds of fragrant steam.

"Breakfast am sarved, honey chile," he crooned soothingly, "an' yo'
Mammy done put the liver wing right ag'in yo' fork."