Uncle Ethan had a theory that a man's character could be told by the way he sat in a wagon seat. "A mean man sets right plumb in the middle o' the seat, as much as to say, 'Walk, gol darn yeh, who cares?' But a man that sets in one corner o' the seat, much as to say, 'Jump in-cheaper t' ride 'n to walk, ' you can jest tie to." Uncle Ripley was prejudiced in favor of the stranger, therefore, before he came opposite the potato patch, where the old man was "bugging his vines."
George Sand is the pen name of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, a 19th century French novelist and memoirist. Sand is best known for her novels Indiana, L?lia, and Consuelo, and for her memoir A Winter in Majorca, in which she reflects on her time on the island with Chopin in 1838-39. A champion of the poor and working classes, Sand was an early socialist who published her own newspaper using a workers co-operative and scorned gender conventions by wearing men s clothing and smoking tobacco in public. George Sand died in France in 1876.