not very good the last time.

I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who had crossed with me
on the ship. He was a merry companion. Sailing with him one morning in
a gondola along the Grand Canal, we saw sitting before a hotel its
porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was
Clark's delight, and he called out, "I say, Buck! what the devil are you
doing here?"

With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern
accent--

"Dey sets me hyar fo' a bait to 'tice de Americans with."

I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and
served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French
girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had
unmistakably "enticed" the maid. To which he replied that it was a free
country; that he had married the damsel--she was his wife; and so the
pair at once packed up and departed.

We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the
devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which
the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia
gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several
times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to
the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused
every free-ticket offered for a journey on "the underground railway," and
went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent.
When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could
have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied--

"Kase it paid. Dere's nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las'
time I went Norf wid massa I made 'nuff out of him to buy myself free
twice't over."

Doubtless there were many instances of "pampered and petted" household
servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they
could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These
were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands,
disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or
relatives sold from them--_as happened on an average once at least in a
life_--were all to a man quite ready to forsake "ole massa" and "dear ole
missus," and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must
be who would sacrifice his _freedom_ to any other living being, be it for
love or fe