elonging to my family, and this nurse has a
husband who is said to be a conductor on what is called the Underground
Road to the free states."

"Lord sakes! a Abolitionist?"

"I hope so," Tilghman said. "I know Vesta wants to set this girl free,
and there is no way to do it, and respect her womanhood, but by giving
her a wild beast's chance to run."

"My, my! And you a minister of the Gospil, William!"

"Yes, of the Gospel that tells me how to be a neighbor to my neighbor."
The young man's eyes flashed. "I never felt so humiliated for my cloth
and for my country as now. To think how many men preach the Gospel of
God all their lives long, and have never set a living soul free. I will
do one such Christian felony, by the help of Christ."

As he spoke, the sound of a corn-stalk fiddle, and of foresters' naked
feet dancing on the floor of the old Milburn cabin, came crooning out in
the night.

In another hour they were at the Furnace village, its blast gone out,
its lines of huts deserted, no human soul to be seen; and the mill-pond,
lying like a parchment under the funereal cypress-trees, seemed stained
with the blood of the bog-ores that oozed upward from the depths like
the corpse of murdered Enterprise, suffocated in Meshach Milburn's
foreclosure.

A sense of desolation filled them all; but what was it, in either of the
white twain, to the bursting ties of that lovely quadroon, raised like a
lily in the household heat of kindness and the breath of purity, to be
cast forth like a witch, on a moment's information, and consigned to the
ponds and night-damps?

The horses toiled through the sand till an open country of farms gave
better roads, and at ten o'clock at night they crossed the Pocomoke at
Snow Hill, and stopped at a gate before a neat, whitewashed, one-story
house, with a large stack-chimney over the centre, and two doors and a
single window in the front. It stood in a short street leading to the
river, whose splutter-docks and reeds were seen near by among the masts
of vessels and the mounds of sawdust.

Virgie kissed Rhoda good-night, and descended with Mr. Tilghman, who
opened a gate, and, going up some steps, knocked at a vine-environed
door. A window opened and there was a parley, and the door soon
afterwards unclosed softly and admitted them.

"Oh, may God let you know some night the pure bed and sleep you have
brought me to!" Virgie whispered. "God bless you for the kiss you gave
me, my dear whi