On Agate Hill Read Free Page B

course but now the paint has peeled off leaving the old brown wood which I like better anyway. The top piazza is held up by plain square posts while the floor of the one below is made from great flat stones brought in long ago from the fields. The top piazza is another place I love for it is there I often sit rocking and reading or dreaming or watching a thunderstorm roll across the land with its lightning that stands like a tree in the sky and its corn wagons rolling. This is what Virgil calls the thunder.
    Myself I love a thunderstorm better than anything. Sometimes I will run to the top of the hill to whirl around and around on my Indian Rock in the wind, it is like a dance I can not stop. The smell of the lightning goes into your nose and down your whole body. Old Bess says if you get hit by lightning yet live you will have special powers, well I could use some of those. So I dont care if I get hit or not. Many times I have got wet clear through and been scolded for it though lately nobody cares.
    All around this house you will see out buildings such as the corn crib, the red carriage barn with its two stables, the pigpen, and the old blacksmith house which has fallen in, you cant hardly see it for the honeysuckle which has run all over it now. And watch out, you will fall into the icehouse hole if you are not careful, so stay out of there! The brick kitchen is right behind the house, with the four-room tenant house on back.
    Negros still live in that row of cabins, some of them work here and some do not, but Uncle Junius hates to send any of them packing for where would they go? Not a one has got what they were promised, that we know of. Besides Virgil and Old Bess and Liddy and Washington there is Daddy Rex the old root doctor who is dying now, I reckon he cant cure himself. In addition there is always negros coming and going or staying awhile, and often they have made off with our things such Aunt Fannies Mexican silver candle sticks won by her daddy in a poker game, and the worst, the curved saber my father carried in the War as he was Cavalry. I hate this for I would like to have it so much, I do not remember him anyway. But it is easy to steal from us as Uncle Junius leaves the house unlocked now since Fannie died, he says if anybody takes anything, why then they need it more than we do and they are welcome to it.
    So the door is wide open.
    Come on in.
    This house is not really very big with only one parlor and a dining room and the middle room and Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannies bedroom down stairs, then a jumble of bedrooms up stairs fitted out with lots of feather beds and ticks that can be spread out on the floor for it was Uncle Junius and Aunt Fannies pride that they never turned any one away, such as Nora Gwyn and her poker ass husband who have stayed the night.
    Come into the passage which goes clear through the house as you see. It is our sitting room in the summer, cool and breezy when they bring the chairs out, but freezing cold in the winter time. Then we must hurry through it. Take the narrow door to your left and climb up the wooden stairs.
    Do not be afraid in this dark staircase for no one will bother you, no one is here.
    But of ghosts we have these:
Alice Heart Petree, my mother, b. 1822, Charleston, South Carolina, d. New Years Eve, 1869, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
Charles William Petree, my little brother, b. 1865, Columbia, South Carolina, d. March 25, 1869, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
My baby sister never named so I know for sure she has not gone to Heaven if there is such a place, this breaks my heart. I see her sometimes in the high dim air up near the ceiling in the parlor before we light the lamps, and once I saw her fly through the trees in the woods among the rising fireflies, just at dusk. B. and d. summer 1866, Agate Hill, North Carolina.
Charles Pleasant Petree, my father, a soldier and a scholar. They say I take after him. If so it must be in spirit not flesh for see, here is his image