edged as much on his death-bed. 'If I had taken your
advice oftener,' said he, 'it would have been better for me. I always
meant to reward you. You are to have your freedom--your freedom, my dear
boy!'"

The negro knitted his brows, his breath came thick, and there was a
strange moisture in his eye.

"I loved my master," he continued, with simple pathos. "And when I saw
him troubled on my account, when he ought to have been thinking of his
own soul, I begged him not to let a thought of me give him any
uneasiness. My free papers had not been made out, and he was for sending
at once for a notary. But his younger brother was with him--he who was
to be his heir. 'Don't vex yourself about Pomp, Edwin,' said he. 'I will
see that justice is done him.'

"'Ah, thank you, brother!' said Edwin. 'You will set him free, and give
him a few hundred dollars to begin life with. Promise that, and I will
rest in peace.' For you must know Edwin had neither wife nor child, and
I was the only person dependent on his bounty. He was not rich; he had
spent a good part of his fortune abroad, and had but recently
established himself in a successful practice in Montgomery. Yet he left
enough so that his brother could have well afforded to give me my
freedom, and a thousand dollars."

"And did he not promise to do so?"

"He promised readily enough. And so my master died, and was buried, and
I--had another master. For a few days nothing was said about free
papers; and I had been too much absorbed in grief for the only man I
loved to think much about them. But when the estate was settled up, and
my new master was preparing to return to his home here in Tennessee, I
grew uneasy.

"'Master,' said I, taking off my hat to him one morning, 'there is
nothing more I can do for him who is gone; so I am thinking I would like
to be for myself now, if you please.'

"'For yourself, you black rascal?' said my new master, laughing in my
face.

"I wasn't used to being spoken to in that way, and it cut. But I kept
down that which swelled up in here"--Pomp laid his hand on his
heart--"and reminded him, respectfully as I could, of the doctor's last
words about me, and of his promise.

"'You fool!' said he, 'do you think I was in earnest?'

"'If you were not,' said I, 'the doctor was.'

"'And do you think,' said he, 'that I am to be bound by the last words
of a man too far gone to know his own mind in the matter?'

"'He always meant I should have my fre