of incessant dancing, feasting
and frolicking from quarter to quarter, and from barn to barn. Then the
banjo, the fiddle and the "bones" are heard from morning until night,
and from night until morning.

And nowhere was this annual octave of festivity held more sacred than
at Hurricane Hall. It was the will of Major Warfield that they should
have their full satisfaction out of their seven days' carnival. He
usually gave a dinner party on Christmas day, after which his people
were free until the third of January.

"Demmy, mum!" he would say to Mrs. Condiment, "they wait on us
fifty-one weeks in the year, and it's hard if we can't wait on
ourselves the fifty-second!"

Small thanks to Old Hurricane for his self-denial! He did nothing for
himself or others, and Mrs. Condiment and Capitola had a hot time of it
in serving him. Mrs. Condiment had to do all the cooking and housework.
And Cap had to perform most of the duties of Major Warfield's valet.
And that was the way in which Old Hurricane waited on himself.

It happened, therefore, that about the middle of the Christmas week,
being Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of December, all the house-servants
and farm laborers from Hurricane Hall went off in a body to a banjo
break-down given at a farm five miles across the country.

And Major Warfield, Mrs. Condiment and Capitola were the only living
beings left in the old house that night.

Black Donald, who had been prowling about the premises evening after
evening, watching his opportunity to effect his nefarious object, soon
discovered the outward bound stampede of the negroes, and the
unprotected state in which the old house, for that night only, would be
left. And he determined to take advantage of the circumstance to
consummate his wicked purpose.

In its then defenceless condition he could easily have mustered his
force and carried off his prize without immediate personal risk. But,
as we said before, he eschewed violence, as being likely to provoke
after effects of a too fatal character.

He resolved rather at once to risk his own personal safety in the
quieter plan of abduction which he had formed.

He determined that as soon as it should be dark he would watch his
opportunity to enter the house, steal to Cap's chamber, secrete himself
in a closet, and when all should be quiet, "in the dead waste and
middle of the night," he would come out, master her, stop her mouth and
carry her off.

When it became quite dar