irons of a Virginia planter,--the
latter by the teeth of his bloodhounds. When I saw that black back, I
cried; and my father might have chosen the place to baptize in, even as
John Baptist did AEnon, "because there was much water there."

John stayed with us three or four weeks and then got moody. Nobody in
the town twitted him as a runaway. He was inexhaustibly strong in
health, and never tired of doing us service as gardener, porter,
errand-boy, and, on occasion, cook. In few places could his hard-won
freedom be less imperilled than with us. At last the secret of his
melancholy came out. He burst into tears, one morning, as he stood with
the fresh-polished boots at the door of my father's study, and sobbed,--

"Massa, I's got to go an' fetch dat yer gal 'n' little Pompey, 'r I's be
done dead afore de yeah's out!"

As always, a woman in the case!

Had it been his own case, I think I know my father well enough to
believe that he would have started directly South for "dat yer gal 'n'
little Pompey," though he had to face a frowning world. But being John's
counsellor, his _role_ was to counsel moderation, and his duty to put
before him the immense improbability of his ever making a second
passage of the Red Sea, if he now returned. If he were caught and
whipped to death, of what benefit could he be to his wife and child? Why
not stay North and buy them?

But the marital and the parental are also the automatic and the
immediate. Reason with love! As well with orange-boughs for bearing
orange-buds, or water upon its boiling-point! When John's earnestness
made my father realize that this is the truth, he gave John all the
available funds in the underground till, and started him off at six in
the morning. I was not awake when he went, and felt that my luck was
down on me. I never should see that hole where the black came up.

For six months the Care-Taker of Ravens had under His sole keeping a
brave head as black as theirs, and a heart like that of the pious negro,
who, in a Southern revival-hymn is thus referred to:--

"O! O!
Him hab face jus' like de crow,
But de Lor' gib him heart like snow."

(The most Southern slaves, who had never travelled and seen snow, found
greater reality in the image of "cotton wool," and used to sing the hymn
with that variation.) At the end of that time, contrary to our most
sanguine expectations, John Peterson appeared. Nor John Peterson alone,
for when he rang our d