ngregation, and resting curiously
upon me, betrayed no recognition. Age, which had whitened his hair and
enfeebled his voice, seemed also to have given him the privilege of
ignoring everything but the grave and the mysteries beyond.

These swift processes of change and decay were calculated to make a
profound impression, but my attention was called away from all such
reflections. Upon a bench near the pulpit, in the section reserved for
the coloured members, sat an old negro man whose face was perfectly
familiar. I had known him in my boyhood as Mingo, the carriage-driver
and body-servant of Judge Junius Wornum. He had changed but little. His
head was whiter than when I saw him last, but his attitude was as firm
and as erect, and the evidences of his wonderful physical strength as
apparent, as ever. He sat with his right hand to his chin, his strong
serious face turned contemplatively toward the rafters. When his eye
chanced to meet mine, a smile of recognition lit up his features, his
head and body drooped forward, and his hand fell away from his face,
completing a salutation at once graceful, picturesque, and imposing.

I have said that few evidences of change manifested themselves in
Mingo; and so it seemed at first, but a closer inspection showed one
remarkable change. I had known him when his chief purpose in life
seemed to be to enjoy himself. He was a slave, to be sure, but his
condition was no restraint upon his spirits. He was known far and wide
as "Laughing Mingo," and upon hundreds of occasions he was the boon
companion of the young men about Rockville in their wild escapades.
Many who read this will remember the "'possum suppers" which it was
Mingo's delight to prepare for these young men, and he counted among
his friends and patrons many who afterward became distinguished both in
war and in the civil professions. At these gatherings, Mingo, bustling
around and serving his guests, would keep the table in a roar with his
quaint sayings, and his local satires in the shape of impromptu
doggerel; and he would also repeat snatches of orations which he had
heard in Washington when Judge Wornum was a member of Congress. But his
chief accomplishments lay in the wonderful ease and fluency with which
he imitated the eloquent appeals of certain ambitious members of the
Kockville bar, and in his travesties of the bombastic flights of the
stump-speakers of that day.

It appeared, however, as he sat in the church, gazin