She left the room and returned with a cup of new milk, warm and sweet. He was glad to get it, finding his black coffee sweetened only with molasses unpalatable.
"Don't you take milk in your coffee? How came you to think of it for me?"
"I knew a lady at the hotel last summer. She said that up no'th 'most everybody does take milk or cream, one, in their coffee."
"I never seed sech. Hit's clar waste to my thinkin'."
Cassandra smiled. "That's because you never could abide milk. Mothah thinks it's only fit to make buttah and raise pigs on."
Old Sally's horse, a thin, wiry beast, gray and speckled, stood ready saddled near the door, his bridle hanging from his neck, the bit dangling while he also made his repast. When he had finished his corn and she had finished her elaborate farewells at the bedside, and little Hoyle had with much effort succeeded in bridling her steed, she stepped quickly out and gained her seat on the high, narrow saddle with the ease of a young girl. Meagre as a willow withe in her scant black cotton gown, perched on her bony gray beast, and only the bowl of her cob pipe projecting beyond the rim of her sunbonnet as indication that a face might be hidden in its depths, with a meal sack containing in either end sundry gifts--salt pork, chicken, corn-bread, and meal--slung over the horse's back behind her, and with contentment in her heart, Aunt Sally rode slowly over the hills to rejoin her old man.