ncompasses my other memories. Everything took place on the poo'ch,
including the free, quite the profuse, consumption of hot cakes and
molasses, including even the domestic manufacture of sausages, testified
to by a strange machine that was worked like a handorgan and by the
casual halves, when not the wholes, of stark stiff hogs fresh from
Kentucky stores. We must have been for a time constantly engaged with
this delightful group, who never ceased to welcome us or to feed us, and
yet of the presence of whose members under other roofs than their own,
by a return of hospitality received, I retain no image. They didn't
count and didn't grudge--the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses
flowing for all who came; that was the expression of their southern
grace, especially embodied in Albert, my exact contemporary and chosen
friend (Reggie had but crushed my fingers under the hinge of a closing
door, the mark of which act of inadvertence I was to carry through
life,) who had profuse and tightly-crinkled hair, and the moral of whose
queer little triangular brown teeth, casting verily a shade on my
attachment to him, was pointed for me, not by himself, as the error of a
Kentucky diet.

The great Kentucky error, however, had been the introduction into a free
State of two pieces of precious property which our friends were to fail
to preserve, the pair of affectionate black retainers whose presence
contributed most to their exotic note. We revelled in the fact that Davy
and Aunt Sylvia (pronounced An'silvy,) a light-brown lad with
extraordinarily shining eyes and his straight, grave, deeper-coloured
mother, not radiant as to anything but her vivid turban, had been born
and kept in slavery of the most approved pattern and such as this
intensity of their condition made them a joy, a joy to the curious mind,
to consort with. Davy mingled in our sports and talk, he enriched, he
adorned them with a personal, a pictorial lustre that none of us could
emulate, and servitude in the absolute thus did more for him socially
than we had ever seen done, above stairs or below, for victims of its
lighter forms. What was not our dismay therefore when we suddenly
learnt--it must have blown right up and down the street--that mother and
son had fled, in the dead of night, from bondage? had taken advantage of
their visit to the North simply to leave the house and not return,
covering their tracks, successfully disappearing. They had never been
fo