is mother's house stood a quaintly carved
black walnut bookcase, containing a small but remarkable collection of
books, which had at one time been used, in his hours of retreat and
relaxation from business and politics, by the distinguished gentleman
who did not give his name to Mis' Molly's children,--to whom it would
have been a valuable heritage, could they have had the right to bear
it. Among the books were a volume of Fielding's complete works, in
fine print, set in double columns; a set of Bulwer's novels; a
collection of everything that Walter Scott--the literary idol of the
South--had ever written; Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, cheek by jowl
with the history of the virtuous Clarissa Harlowe; the Spectator and
Tristram Shandy, Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights. On these
secluded shelves Roderick Random, Don Quixote, and Gil Blas for a long
time ceased their wanderings, the Pilgrim's Progress was suspended,
Milton's mighty harmonies were dumb, and Shakespeare reigned over a
silent kingdom. An illustrated Bible, with a wonderful Apocrypha, was
flanked on one side by Volney's Ruins of Empire and on the other by
Paine's Age of Reason, for the collector of the books had been a man of
catholic taste as well as of inquiring mind, and no one who could have
criticised his reading ever penetrated behind the cedar hedge. A
history of the French Revolution consorted amiably with a homespun
chronicle of North Carolina, rich in biographical notices of
distinguished citizens and inscriptions from their tombstones, upon
reading which one might well wonder why North Carolina had not long ago
eclipsed the rest of the world in wealth, wisdom, glory, and renown.
On almost every page of this monumental work could be found the most
ardent panegyrics of liberty, side by side with the slavery statistics
of the State,--an incongruity of which the learned author was
deliciously unconscious.

When John Walden was yet a small boy, he had learned all that could be
taught by the faded mulatto teacher in the long, shiny black frock
coat, whom local public opinion permitted to teach a handful of free
colored children for a pittance barely enough to keep soul and body
together. When the boy had learned to read, he discovered the library,
which for several years had been without a reader, and found in it the
portal of a new world, peopled with strange and marvelous beings. Lying
prone upon the floor of the shaded front piazza, behind th