every Sunday he sat behind his master and in full view of a
board on the wall of the south aisle whereon in scarlet letters on a
buff ground were emblazoned certain bequests and charities left to
the parish by the pious dead. The churchwardens who had set up this
list, with the date, September 1757, and attested it with their
names, had prudently left a fair blank space thereunder for
additions. Often, during the Vicar's sermons, poor Scipio's gaze had
dwelt on this blank space. Maybe the scarlet lettering above it
fascinated him. Negroes are notoriously fond of scarlet. But out
upon me for so mean a guess at his motives! Scipio, regarding this
board Sunday by Sunday, saw in imagination his own name added to that
glorious roll. He had a few pounds laid by. He owned neither wife
nor child. Why should it not be? He was black: but a black man's
money passed current as well as a white man's. Might not his name,
Scipio Johnson, stand some day and be remembered as well as that of
Joshua Milliton, A.M. (whatever A.M. might mean), who in 1714 had
bequeathed moneys to provide, every Whit-Sunday and Christmas,
"twelve white loaves of half a peck to as many virtuous poor widows"?

So when Miss Marty confided the news to him in the pantry where, as
always at ten in the morning, he was engaged in cleaning the plate,
Scipio's hand shook so violently that the silver sugar-basin slipped
from his hold and, crashing down upon the breakfast-tray, broke two
cups and the slop-basin into small fragments.

"Oh, Scipio!" Miss Marty's two hands went up in horrified dismay.
"How could you be so careless!"

"The Millennium, miss!"

"We can never replace it--never!"

Scipio gazed at the tray: but what he saw was a shattered dream--a
cracked board strewn with fragmentary scarlet letters and flourishes,
"brief flourishes."--"Ole man Satan is among us sho 'nuff, Miss
Marty: among us and kickin' up Saint's Delight, because his time is
short. I was jes' thinkin' of the widows, miss."

"You have spoilt the set . . . eh? _what_ widows? You don't mean to
tell me that Satan--?"

Miss Marty broke off and gazed at Scipio with dawning suspicion,
distrust, apprehension. She had never completely reconciled herself
with the poor fellow's colour. The Major, in moments of irritation,
would address him as "You black limb of Satan." He came from the
Gold Coast, and she had heard strange stories of that happily
distant, undesirable shore; s