350 HOME LIFE IN FLORIDA. 



It was a great disadvantage to her well-being as well as 

 to ours, that her family lived only a few miles away, and 

 their influence and example were constantly drawing her 

 back into her old ways. 



Whenever allowed to visit her old home, even for one 

 day, she would return with the buttons cut from her dress 

 and pins inserted in their place, and every little article of 

 adornment that had been given her, ribbons, collars, hats, 

 handkerchiefs, shared the same fate. ''Mom tuck 'em," 

 was the explanation ; even her dresses were carried off 

 when *' Mom" or her elder sisters came to see her. 



Looking at the full moon one night, soon after she came 

 into our household, through a powerful field-glass, her first 

 experience of the kind, the Goddess startled us by a shriek, 

 and dropping the glass, turned a summersault backward 

 up the portico-steps, and lay there gasping with her eyes 

 shut. Presently she opened them, and raised herself cau- 

 tiously, looked up at the far-away luminary, then at us and 

 the field-glass, in a ludicrously bewildered way, then draw- 

 ing a long breath, exclaimed, 



' ' Oh, LaAvd ! I done thought fur shure it was tumblin' 

 on top of me ! I was skeert most to death ! " 



Familiarity breeds contempt ; finding that the dreaded 

 luminary still remained at a safe distance, the Goddess 

 proceeded to tell us about the man who lived up there ; 

 how once, long, long ago, a bad black man had gone out to 

 pick up a load of wood on Sunday, when the Lord had 

 told him not to, and how, to punish him, he had been sent 

 to live alone in the moon, and forever walk about with a 

 load of wood on his back ; and how, ever since, he had been 

 trying 'to make other folks bad so as to have some company. 



This, we afterward found, was the negro explanation of 

 the far-famed '' man in the moon," one of their many su- 

 perstitions. 



