“You are now in Canada, Grandison, where your people go when they run away from their masters.  If you wished, Grandison, you might walk away from me this very minute, and I could not lay my hand upon you to take you back.”

Grandison looked around uneasily.

“Let ’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick.  I ’s feared I ’ll lose you ovuh heah, an’ den I won’ hab no marster, an’ won’t nebber be able to git back home no mo’.”

Discouraged, but not yet hopeless, Dick said, a few minutes later,——­

“Grandison, I ’m going up the road a bit, to the inn over yonder.  You stay here until I return.  I ’ll not be gone a great while.”

Grandison’s eyes opened wide and he looked somewhat fearful.

“Is dey any er dem dadblasted abolitioners roun’ heah, Mars Dick?”

“I don’t imagine that there are,” replied his master, hoping there might be.  “But I ’m not afraid of your running away, Grandison.  I only wish I were,” he added to himself.

Dick walked leisurely down the road to where the whitewashed inn, built of stone, with true British solidity, loomed up through the trees by the roadside.  Arrived there he ordered a glass of ale and a sandwich, and took a seat at a table by a window, from which he could see Grandison in the distance.  For a while he hoped that the seed he had sown might have fallen on fertile ground, and that Grandison, relieved from the restraining power of a master’s eye, and finding himself in a free country, might get up and walk away; but the hope was vain, for Grandison remained faithfully at his post, awaiting his master’s return.  He had seated himself on a broad flat stone, and, turning his eyes away from the grand and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay close at hand, was looking anxiously toward the inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed fidelity.

By and by a girl came into the room to serve his order, and Dick very naturally glanced at her; and as she was young and pretty and remained in attendance, it was some minutes before he looked for Grandison.  When he did so his faithful servant had disappeared.

To pay his reckoning and go away without the change was a matter quickly accomplished.  Retracing his footsteps toward the Falls, he saw, to his great disgust, as he approached the spot where he had left Grandison, the familiar form of his servant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open, sleeping the time away, oblivious alike to the grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment.

“Grandison,” soliloquized his master, as he stood gazing down at his ebony encumbrance, “I do not deserve to be an American citizen; I ought not to have the advantages I possess over you; and I certainly am not worthy of Charity Lomax, if I am not smart enough to get rid of you.  I have an idea!  You shall yet be free, and I will be the instrument of your deliverance.  Sleep on, faithful and affectionate servitor, and dream of the blue grass and the bright skies of old Kentucky, for it is only in your dreams that you will ever see them again!”