ago the fullest
confidence of the whole connection, and the experience of four-score
years and ten had proved that this confidence was well placed. Some
imputed the sort of exile in which the old man had so long lived to
love; others to war; and others, again, to the consequences of those
fierce personal feuds that are known to occur among men in the savage
state. But all was just as much a mystery and matter of conjecture, now
we were drawing near to the middle of the nineteenth century, as it had
been when our forefathers were receding from the middle of the
eighteenth! To return to the negro.

Although Jaaf had momentarily forgotten me, and quite forgotten my
parents, he remembered my sister, who was in the habit of seeing him so
often. In what manner he connected her with the family, it is not easy
to say; but he knew her not only by sight, but by name, and, as one
might say, by blood.

"Yes, yes," cried the old fellow, a little eagerly, '_champing_' his
thick lips together, somewhat as an alligator snaps his jaws, "yes, I
knows Miss Patty, of course. Miss Patty is werry han'some, and grows
han'somer and han'somer ebbery time I sees her--yah, yah, yah!" The
laugh of that old negro sounded startling and unnatural, yet there was
something of the joyous in it, after all, like every negro's laugh.
"Yah, yah, yah! Yes, Miss Patty won'erful han'some, and werry like Miss
Dus. I s'pose, now, Miss Patty wast born about 'e time dat Gin'ral
Washington die."

As this was a good deal more than doubling my sister's age, it produced
a common laugh among the light-hearted girls in the carriage. A gleam of
intelligence that almost amounted to a smile also shot athwart the
countenance of the Onondago, while the muscles of his face worked, but
he said nothing. I had reason to know afterwards that the tablet of his
memory retained its records better.

"What friends have you with you to-day, Jaaf," inquired my grandmother,
inclining her head towards us pedlars graciously, at the same time; a
salutation that my uncle Ro and myself rose hastily to acknowledge.

As for myself, I own honestly that I could have jumped into the vehicle
and kissed my dear grandmother's still good-looking but colourless
cheeks, and hugged Patt, and possibly some of the others, to my heart.
Uncle Ro had more command of himself; though I could see that the sound
of his venerable parent's voice, in which the tremour was barely
perceptible, was near overcomin