rsed or removed, another negro company was on the
shore, ready to re-people the slave-quarter. The mutabilities of human
life had seemed to him to be appointed to whites--to be their privilege
and their discipline; while he doubted not that the eternal command to
blacks was to bear and forbear. When he now looked upon his boys, and
remembered that for them this order was broken up, and in time for them
to grasp a future, and prepare for it--that theirs was the lot of
whites, in being involved in social changes, he regarded them with a far
deeper solicitude and tenderness than in the darkest midnight hours of
their childish illnesses, or during the sweetest prattle of their
Sabbath afternoons, and with a far stronger hopefulness than can ever
enter the heart or home of a slave. They had not his habitual patience;
and he saw that they were little likely to attain it; but they daily
manifested qualities and powers--enterprise, forecast, and aspiration of
various kinds, adorning their youth with a promise which made their
father sigh at the retrospect of his own. He was amused, at the same
time, to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity, to which he had either
not been prone, or which he had early extinguished. He detected in each
the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their
military accomplishments to those with whom they were always exchanging
thoughts over the ridge. He foresaw that when they should have improved
a little in certain exercises, he should be receiving hints about a
visit to the shore, and that there would then be such a display upon the
sands as should excite prodigious admiration, and make Denis break his
heart that he must not go to the camp.

Meantime, he amused them in the evenings, with as many of his officers
as chose to look on, by giving them the history of the wars of Asia and
Europe, as he had learned it from books, and thoroughly mastered it by
reflection. Night after night was the map of Greece traced with his
sword's point on the sand behind his tent, while he related the
succession of the conflicts with Persia, with a spirit derived from old
Herodotus himself. Night after night did the interest of his hearers
arouse more and more spirit in himself, till he became aware that his
sympathies with the Greeks in their struggles for liberty had hitherto
been like those of the poet born blind, who delights in describing
natural scenery--thus unconsciously enjoying