here there's better chance to pick up small earnings," remarked uncle,
"those two and Sidney would have bought their freedom by now, and
Mingo's too. Silas has got nearly enough to buy his own, as it is."

Silas, my aunt explained, was a carpenter. "He hands your uncle so
much a week; all he can make beyond that he's allowed to keep." The
carriage stopped at the door; half a dozen servants came, smiling, and
I knew Sidney and Hester at a glance, they were so finely different
from their fellows.

That night the daughter and I made acquaintance. She was eighteen,
tall, lithe and as straight as an arrow. She had not one of the
physical traits that so often make her race uncomely to our eyes; even
her nose was good; her very feet were well made, her hands were slim
and shapely, the fingers long and neatly jointed, and there was nothing
inky in her amazing blackness, her red blood so enriched it. Yet she
was as really African in her strong, eager mind as in her color, and
the English language, on her tongue, was like a painter's palette and
brushes in the hands of a monkey. Her first question to me after my
last want was supplied came cautiously, after a long gaze at my lighted
lamp, from a seat on the floor. "Miss Maud, when was de conwention o'
coal-oil 'scuvvud?" And to her good night she added, in allusion to my
eventual return to the North, "I hope it be a long time afo' you make
dat repass!"

At the next bedtime she began on me with the innocent question of my
favorite flower, but I had not answered three other questions before
she had placed me where I must either say I did not believe in the
right to hold slaves, or must keep silence; and when I kept silence of
course she knew. For a long moment she dropped her eyes, and then,
with a soft smile, asked if I would tell her some Bible stories,
preferably that of "Moses in de boundaries o' Egyp'."

She listened in gloating silence, rarely interrupting; but at the
words, "Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, 'Let my people go,'" the
response, "Pra-aise Gawd!" rose from her lips in such volume that she
threw her hands to her mouth. After that she spoke only soft queries,
but they grew more and more significant, and I soon saw that her
supposed content was purely a pious endurance, and that her soul felt
bondage as her body would have felt a harrow. So I left the fugitives
of Egyptian slavery under the frown of the Almighty in the wilderness
of Sin; Sidney was