s crevice in the rocks. "Do you know that name? It is that
of its former owner--the man who called himself my master. Do you think
it was taking too much from one who would have robbed me of my soul?"

He held the stock over the bed, so that Penn could make out the
lettering. Delicately engraved on a surface of inlaid silver, was the
well-known name,--

"_Augustus Bythewood._"

XV.

_AN ANTI-SLAVERY DOCUMENT ON BLACK PARCHMENT._

Penn was not surprised at this discovery. He had already recognized in
Pomp the hero of a story which he had heard before.

"But all this happened before I came to Tennessee, did it not? Have you
lived in this cave ever since?"

"It is three years since I took to the mountains. But I have spent but a
little of that time here. Sometimes, for weeks together, I am away,
tramping the hills, exploring the forests, sleeping on the ground in the
open air, living on fish, game, and fruits. That is in the summer time.
Winters I burrow here."

"If you are so independent in your movements, why have you never escaped
to the north?"

"Would I be any better off there? Does not the color of a negro's skin,
even in your free states, render him an object of suspicion and hatred?
What chance is there for a man like me?"

"Little--very true!" said Penn, sadly, contemplating the form of the
powerful and intelligent black, and thinking with indignation and shame
of the prejudice which excludes men of his race from the privileges of
free men, even in the free north.

"These crags," said the African, "do not look scornfully upon me because
of the color of my skin. The watercourses sing for me their gladdest
songs, black as I am. And the serious trees seem to love me, even as I
love them. It is a savage, lonely, but not unhappy life I lead--far
better for a man like me than servitude here, or degradation at the
north. I have one faithful human friend at least. Cudjo, cunning and
capricious as he seems, is capable of genuine devotion."

"Have you two been together long?"

"One day, a few weeks after I took to the mountains, I was watching for
an animal which I heard rustling the foliage of a tree that grows up out
of a chasm. I held my gun ready to fire, when I perceived that my animal
was something human. It climbed the tree, ran out on one of the
branches, leaped, like a squirrel, to some bushes that grew in the wall
of the chasm, and soon pulled itself up to the top. Then I saw that it
w