gentle blood by any of its signs,—­the transparent animal life, the reticent eye, the mastered voice:  he had better men than Lamar at home to learn it from.  It is a trait of serfdom, the keen eye to measure the inherent rights of a man to be master.  A negro or a Catholic Irishman does not need “Sartor Resartus” to help him to see through any clothes.  Ben leaned, half-asleep, against the wall, some old thoughts creeping out of their hiding-places through the torpor, like rats to the sunshine:  the boatman’s slang had been hot and true enough to rouse them in his brain.

“So, Ben,” said his master, as he passed once, “your friend has been persuading you to exchange the cotton-fields at Cedar Creek for New-York alleys, eh?”

“Ki!” laughed Ben, “white darkey.  Mind ole dad, Mars’ John, as took off in der swamp?  Um asked dat Linkinite ef him saw dad up Norf.  Guess him’s free now.  Ki! ole dad!”

“The swamp was the place for him,” said Lamar.  “I remember.”

“Dunno,” said the negro, surlily:  “him’s dad, af’er all:  tink him’s free now,”—­and mumbled down into a monotonous drone about

  “Oh yo, bredern, is yer gwine ober Jordern?”

Half-asleep, they thought,—­but with dull questionings at work in his brain, some queer notions about freedom, of that unknown North, mostly mixed with his remembrance of his father, a vicious old negro, that in Pennsylvania would have worked out his salvation in the under cell of the penitentiary, but in Georgia, whipped into heroism, had betaken himself into the swamp, and never returned.  Tradition among the Lamar slaves said he had got off to Ohio, of which they had as clear an idea as most of us have of heaven.  At any rate, old Kite became a mystery, to be mentioned with awe at fish-bakes and barbecues.  He was this uncouth wretch’s father,—­do you understand?  The flabby-faced boy, flogged in the cotton-field for whining after his dad, or hiding away part of his flitch and molasses for months in hopes the old man would come back, was rather a comical object, you would have thought.  Very different his, from the feeling with which you left your mother’s grave,—­though as yet we have not invented names for the emotions of those people.  We’ll grant that it hurt Ben a little, however.  Even the young polypus, when it is torn from the old one, bleeds a drop or two, they say.  As he grew up, the great North glimmered through his thought, a sort of big field,—­a paradise of no work, no flogging, and white bread every day, where the old man sat and ate his fill.

The second point in Ben’s history was that he fell in love.  Just as you did,—­with the difference, of course:  though the hot sun, or the perpetual foot upon his breast, does not make our black Prometheus less fierce in his agony of hope or jealousy than you, I am afraid.  It was Nan, a pale mulatto house-servant, that the field-hand took into his dull, lonesome heart to make life of, with