rgivingly, "I infer, that
you, a Missourian, though living in a slave-state, are without slave
sentiments."

"Aye, but are you? Is not that air of yours, so spiritlessly enduring
and yielding, the very air of a slave? Who is your master, pray; or are
you owned by a company?"

"_My_ master?"

"Aye, for come from Maine or Georgia, you come from a slave-state, and a
slave-pen, where the best breeds are to be bought up at any price from a
livelihood to the Presidency. Abolitionism, ye gods, but expresses the
fellow-feeling of slave for slave."

"The back-woods would seem to have given you rather eccentric notions,"
now with polite superiority smiled the herb-doctor, still with manly
intrepidity forbearing each unmanly thrust, "but to return; since, for
your purpose, you will have neither man nor boy, bond nor free, truly,
then some sort of machine for you is all there is left. My desires for
your success attend you, sir.--Ah!" glancing shoreward, "here is Cape
Giradeau; I must leave you."

CHAPTER XXII.

IN THE POLITE SPIRIT OF THE TUSCULAN DISPUTATIONS.

--"'Philosophical Intelligence Office'--novel idea! But how did you come
to dream that I wanted anything in your absurd line, eh?"

About twenty minutes after leaving Cape Giradeau, the above was growled
out over his shoulder by the Missourian to a chance stranger who had
just accosted him; a round-backed, baker-kneed man, in a mean
five-dollar suit, wearing, collar-wise by a chain, a small brass plate,
inscribed P. I. O., and who, with a sort of canine deprecation, slunk
obliquely behind.

"How did you come to dream that I wanted anything in your line, eh?"

"Oh, respected sir," whined the other, crouching a pace nearer, and, in
his obsequiousness, seeming to wag his very coat-tails behind him,
shabby though they were, "oh, sir, from long experience, one glance
tells me the gentleman who is in need of our humble services."

"But suppose I did want a boy--what they jocosely call a good boy--how
could your absurd office help me?--Philosophical Intelligence Office?"

"Yes, respected sir, an office founded on strictly philosophical and
physio----"

"Look you--come up here--how, by philosophy or physiology either, make
good boys to order? Come up here. Don't give me a crick in the neck.
Come up here, come, sir, come," calling as if to his pointer. "Tell me,
how put the requisite assortment of good qualities into a boy, as the
assorted mince into the pi