oth full of cotton rolls,
pretty in their whiteness and roundness and softness, meantime
coquettishly turning her still girlish head on one side, and saying:
"Now, Mr. Browne, why don't you praise my cotton? Did you ever see
better carding than that?"

The young planter took a roll of the cotton in his hands, holding it
gingerly, and essaying absentmindedly to yield to his wife's mood. Just
at that moment Sanford Browne the younger, a boy about eight years of
age, came round the corner of the house and stood in front of his
father, with his feet wide apart, feeling among the miscellanies in the
bottom of his pocket for a periwinkle shell.

"How would you like to have him spirited away by a crimp, Judy?"
demanded the husband, replacing the cotton and pointing to the lad.

"I should just die, dear," said Judy Browne in a low voice.

"That's what happened to my mother, I suppose," said Browne. "I hope
she died; it would be too bad to think that she had to live all these
twenty-two years imagining all sorts of things about her lost little
boy. I remember her, Judy, the day I saw her last. I went out of a side
street into Fleet Street, and then I grew curious and went on out
through Temple Bar into the road they call the Strand. I did not know
how far I had gone from the city until I heard the great bell of St.
Martin's in the Fields chiming at five o'clock. I turned toward the
city again, but stopped along the way to look at the noblemen's houses.
Somehow, at last I got into Lincoln's Inn Fields and could not tell
which way to go. Just then a sea captain came up to me, and, pretending
to know me, told me he would fetch me to my father. I went with him,
and he got me into a boat and so down to his ship below the bridge. The
ship was already taking aboard a lot of kids and freewillers out of the
cook houses, where some of them had been shut up for weeks. I cried and
begged for my father, but the captain only kicked and cuffed me. It was
a long and wretched voyage, as I have told you often. I was brought
here and sold to work with negroes and convicts. I don't so much mind
the beatings I got, or the hard living, but to think of all my mother
has suffered, and that I shall never see her or my father again! If I
ever lay eyes on that Captain Lewis, he will go to the devil before he
has time to say any prayers."

"I'd like to shoot him," said the boy, in sympathy with his father's
mood. "I'll kill him when I get big enough,