“Listen,” he said, “they might be widening the road to Beaufort, but I got three dollars says I get there just as fast by the power of my eternal mind.”

“The slave children all carried mussel shells in their hands to eat with. The food was put on large trays and the children all gathered around and ate, dipping up their food with their mussel shells, which they used as spoons.”

“Is that little dog deceased yet?”

“You know,” she said, “I just love that skittery song the willets make when they open up their black-tipped wings and the sandpipers go bunched over the water like a cloud of mosquitoes.”

“Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, did that for her own good. She had her own interests at heart, and I don’t like her. Lincoln, or none of the crowd. The Yankees helped free us, so they say, but they let us be put back in slavery again.”

“If someone or something didn’t make,” he said, “so many birds nearly alike, we wouldn’t be saying, ‘No, that one doesn’t have the white throat or the black bill or the wind-blown tuft the back of its head,’ just to explain exactness and the way we get to name quill and pimple and horny toe.”