a few duplicate volumes from his law library, "Burn that if you don't
want it," had tossed him a fat document indorsed: "_Memorandum of an
Early Experience_." Later the nephew had glanced it over, but, like
"Maud's" story, its first few lines had annoyed his critical sense and he
had never read it carefully. The amazing point was that "_Now, Maud_"
and this "_Memorandum_" most incredibly--with a ridiculous nicety--fitted
each other.

He lifted the magazine again and, beginning at the beginning a third
time, read with a scrutiny of every line as though he studied a witness's
deposition. And this was what he read:

IV

THE CLOCK IN THE SKY

"Now, Maud," said uncle jovially as he, aunt, and I drove into the
confines of their beautiful place one spring afternoon of 1860, "don't
forget that to be too near a thing is as bad for a good view of it as
to be too far away."

I was a slim, tallish girl of scant sixteen, who had never seen a
slaveholder on his plantation, though I had known these two for years,
and loved them dearly, as guests in our Northern home before it was
broken up by the death of my mother. Father was an abolitionist, and
yet he and they had never had a harsh word between them. If the
general goodness of those who do some particular thing were any proof
that that particular thing is good to do, they would have convinced me,
without a word, that slaveholding was entirely right. But they were
not trying to do any such thing. "Remember," continued my uncle,
smiling round at me, "your dad's trusting you not to bring back our
honest opinion--of anything--in place of your own."

"Maud," my aunt hurried to put in, for she knew the advice I had just
heard was not the kind I most needed, "you're going to have for your
own maid the blackest girl you ever saw."

"And the best," added my uncle; "she's as good as she is black."

"She's no common darky, that Sidney," said aunt. "She'll keep you busy
answering questions, my dear, and I say now, you may tell her anything
she wants to know; we give you perfect liberty; and you may be just as
free with Hester; that's her mother; or with her father, Silas."

"We draw the line at Mingo," said uncle.

"And who is Mingo?" I inquired.

"Mingo? he's her brother; a very low and trailing branch of the family
tree."

As we neared the house I was told more of the father and mother; their
sweet content, their piety, their diligence. "If we lived in town,
w