very nervous movement, and managed to
escape from the room as silently, before the Colonel's hand had yet been
laid upon the glass door to open it.

There were half a dozen unoccupied rooms on the next floor, as she well
knew, and up the stairs and into one of these she bounded, her cheeks
still more aglow than they had been when she set out on her
"reconnoissance," and her eyes still more wild and startled, while a
strange tremor creeping at her heart told her that she had been witness
to much more than could yet be shaped into words or embodied even in
thought! Poor girl!--how her brain throbbed and how her heart beat like
ten thousand little trip-hammers!--the usual and very proper penalty
which we pay for an indiscretion!

CHAPTER VII.

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONTRABAND, WITH SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON--THREE
MONTHS BEFORE--AUNT SYNCHY AND THE OBI POISONING--A NICE LITTLE
ARRANGEMENT OF EGBERT CRAWFORD'S.

Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether
indispensable character. Not new to the world--sorrow for the world that
it is not! Not new to the country--wo to the country that it has filled
so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious
narration--the _contraband_. The negro must come in, by all means and at
all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written
without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past
forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some
incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes
of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no
distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of
position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed,
apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster
before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that
grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more
an object of mirth than of terror--and it certainly gave promise of
profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to
laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less
comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and
the black--the sharp profile and the broad lip--the springing instep and
the protuberant heel--have been having a long tussle, with the
probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-da