ch puts all on to their feet and then down into
their seats with incredible quickness, the carriage stops,--and, after
much outside commotion, Cudjoe appears at the door.

"Please, sir, it's powerful bad spot, this' yer. I don't know how we's
to get clar out. I'm a thinkin' we'll have to be a gettin' rails."

The senator despairingly steps out, picking gingerly for some firm
foothold; down goes one foot an immeasurable depth,--he tries to pull it
up, loses his balance, and tumbles over into the mud, and is fished out,
in a very despairing condition, by Cudjoe.

But we forbear, out of sympathy to our readers' bones. Western
travellers, who have beguiled the midnight hour in the interesting
process of pulling down rail fences, to pry their carriages out of mud
holes, will have a respectful and mournful sympathy with our unfortunate
hero. We beg them to drop a silent tear, and pass on.

It was full late in the night when the carriage emerged, dripping
and bespattered, out of the creek, and stood at the door of a large
farmhouse.

It took no inconsiderable perseverance to arouse the inmates; but at
last the respectable proprietor appeared, and undid the door. He was a
great, tall, bristling Orson of a fellow, full six feet and some inches
in his stockings, and arrayed in a red flannel hunting-shirt. A very
heavy mat of sandy hair, in a decidedly tousled condition, and a beard
of some days' growth, gave the worthy man an appearance, to say the
least, not particularly prepossessing. He stood for a few minutes
holding the candle aloft, and blinking on our travellers with a dismal
and mystified expression that was truly ludicrous. It cost some effort
of our senator to induce him to comprehend the case fully; and while he
is doing his best at that, we shall give him a little introduction to
our readers.

Honest old John Van Trompe was once quite a considerable land-owner and
slave-owner in the State of Kentucky. Having "nothing of the bear about
him but the skin," and being gifted by nature with a great, honest, just
heart, quite equal to his gigantic frame, he had been for some years
witnessing with repressed uneasiness the workings of a system equally
bad for oppressor and oppressed. At last, one day, John's great heart
had swelled altogether too big to wear his bonds any longer; so he
just took his pocket-book out of his desk, and went over into Ohio, and
bought a quarter of a township of good, rich land, made out free