een into Miss Emma's prayer-book the angels with wings high
and shining all from head to foot?"

"Yes," said Flor,--"_Angels_."

"And one of them you 'll be, Lome, ef you jus' choose,--ef, for
instance, you choose liberty to-day."

"Lors now, Sarp, I doan' b'lieb a word you say! Get out wid yer
conundrums! Likely story, little black nigger like dis yere am be put
into de groun' an' 'come out all so great an' w'ite an' shinin'-like!"

"'For God shall deliver my soul from the power of the grave.'
_'Shall.'_ That's a promise,--a promise in the Book. Di'n't yer eber
plant a bean, Lome,--little hard black bean? And did a little hard black
bean come up? No, but two wings of leaves, and a white blossom jus'
ready to fly itself, and so sweet you could smell it acrost de field. So
they plant your body in the earth, Lome"----

"You go 'long, Sarp! Ef you plant beans, beans come up," said Flor,
decisively.

This direct and positive confutation rather nonplussed Sarp, his theory
not being able at once to assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling,
that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such
atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season
again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul
must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from
which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his
simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which
the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but
dared not pursue it unadvised, for fear of the quicksands into which it
might betray him. He merely tied a knot in the thread of his discourse
by answering,--

"Jus' so. The bean planted, the bean comes up. You planted, and what
follows?"

"I come up," said Flor, consentingly, and quite as if he had got the
better of the discussion.

Then he rose, and Flor led the way back to Miss Emma,--having first,
upon Sarp's serious hesitation, pledged herself for Miss Emma's secrecy
and gratitude with tears and asseverations.

In spite of the fact that he had never meant nor cared to see it again,
there was something pleasant to Sarp in the face of the sleeper upturned
in a moonbeam. He stooped and lifted her tenderly, and laid her head on
his shoulder. The young girl opened her eyes vacantly, but heard Flor's
voice beside her still,--

"Doan' ye be scaret now, honey! Bress you, 's a true frien': he'