This particular old black woman was a striking specimen of her class.  Old as she looked, her eye was bright and knowing.  She wore a red-and-yellow turban, which set off her complexion well, and hoops of gold in her ears, and beads of gold about her neck, and an old funeral ring upon her finger.  She had that touching stillness about her which belongs to animals that wait to be spoken to and then look up with a kind of sad humility.

“Why, Sophy!” said the good minister, “is this you?”

She looked up with the still expression on her face.  “It’s old Sophy,” she said.

“Why,” said the Doctor, “I did not believe you could walk so far as this to save the Union.  Bring Sophy a glass of wine, Letty.  Wine’s good for old folks like Sophy and me, after walking a good way, or preaching a good while.”

The young girl stepped into the back-parlor, where she found the great pewter flagon in which the wine that was left after each communion-service was brought to the minister’s house.  With much toil she managed to tip it so as to get a couple of glasses filled.  The minister tasted his, and made old Sophy finish hers.

“I wan’ to see you ‘n’ talk wi’ you all alone,” she said presently.

The minister got up and led the way towards his study.  “To be sure,” he said; he had only waited for her to rest a moment before he asked her into the library.  The young girl took her gently by the arm, and helped her feeble steps along the passage.  When they reached the study, she smoothed the cushion of a rocking-chair, and made the old woman sit down in it.  Then she tripped lightly away, and left her alone with the minister.

Old Sophy was a member of the Reverend Doctor Honeywood’s church.  She had been put through the necessary confessions in a tolerably satisfactory manner.  To be sure, as her grandfather had been a cannibal chief, according to the common story, and, at any rate, a terrible wild savage, and as her mother retained to the last some of the prejudices of her early education, there was a heathen flavor in her Christianity, which had often scandalized the elder of the minister’s two deacons.  But the good minister had smoothed matters over:  had explained that allowances were to be made for those who had been long sitting without the gate of Zion,—­that, no doubt, a part of the curse which descended to the children of Ham consisted in “having the understanding darkened,” as well as the skin,—­and so had brought his suspicious senior deacon to tolerate old Sophy as one of the communion of fellow-sinners.

* * * * *

——­Poor things!  How little we know the simple notions with which these rudiments of souls are nourished by the Divine Goodness!  Did not Mrs. Professor come home this very blessed morning with a story of one of her old black women?

“And how do you feel to-day, Mrs. Robinson?”

“Oh, my dear, I have this singing in my head all the time.” (What doctors call tinnitus aurium.)