"Early next morning they went down-town, hand in hand, to the store, and little Susy bought a bag of goober-peas, and sticks and sticks of striped candy, and a limber jack, and a gold ring, and a wax doll with a silk dress on that could open and shut its eyes--"
"Huh!" said the captious Cozy. "You can't buy a wax doll for a dollar. My littlest, littlest one cost three, and she didn't have a stitch to her back!"
"Shut up!" said Rickey briefly. "Dolls were cheaper then." She looked at the row of little negroes, goggle-eyed at the vision of such largess. "What do you think little Mary did with _her_ gold dollar? She loved dolls and candy, too, but she had heard about the poo-oo-r heathen. There was a tear in her eye, but she took the dollar home, and next day when she went to Sunday-school, she dropped it in the missionary-box.
"Little children, what do you reckon became of that dollar? It bought a big satchelful of tracts for a missionary. He had been a poor man with six children and a wife with a bone-felon on her right hand--not a child old enough to wash dishes and all of them young enough to fall in the fire--so he had to go and be a missionary. He was going to Alabam--to a cannibal island, and he took the tracts and sailed away in a ship that landed him on the shore. And when the heathen cannibals saw him they were ve-e-ery glad, for there hadn't been any shipwrecked sailors for a long time, and they were ve-e-ery hungry. So they tied up the missionary and gathered a lot of wood to make a fire and cook him.
"But it had rained and rained and rained for so long that the wood was all wet, and it wouldn't burn, and they all cried because they were so hungry. And then they happened to find the satchelful of tracts, and the tracts were ve-e-ery _dry_. They took them and stuck them under the wet wood, and the tracts burned and the wood caught fire and they _cooked_ the missionary and ATE him.
"Now, little children, which do you think did the most good with her dollar--little Susy or little Mary?"
The front row sniggered, and a sigh came from the colored ranks. "Dem ar' can'bals," gasped a dusky infant breathlessly, "--dey done eat up all dat candy en dem goober-peas, too?"