true-love defiance of caste.  I think Nan liked him very truly.  She was lame and sickly, and if Ben was black and a picker, and stayed in the quarters, he was strong, like a master to her in some ways:  the only thing she could call hers in the world was the love the clumsy boy gave her.  White women feel in that way sometimes, and it makes them very tender to men not their equals.  However, old Mrs. Lamar, before she died, gave her house-servants their free papers, and Nan was among them.  So she set off, with all the finery little Floy could give her:  went up into that great, dim North.  She never came again.

The North swallowed up all Ben knew or felt outside of his hot, hated work, his dread of a lashing on Saturday night.  All the pleasure left him was ’possum and hominy for Sunday’s dinner.  It did not content him.  The spasmodic religion of the field-negro does not teach endurance.  So it came, that the slow tide of discontent ebbing in everybody’s heart towards some unreached sea set in his ignorant brooding towards that vague country which the only two who cared for him had found.  If he forgot it through the dogged, sultry days, he remembered it when the overseer scourged the dull tiger-look into his eyes, or when, husking corn with the others at night, the smothered negro-soul, into which their masters dared not look, broke out in their wild, melancholy songs.  Aimless, unappealing, yet no prayer goes up to God more keen in its pathos.  You find, perhaps, in Beethoven’s seventh symphony the secrets of your heart made manifest, and suddenly think of a Somewhere to come, where your hope waits for you with late fulfilment.  Do not laugh at Ben, then, if he dully told in his song the story of all he had lost, or gave to his heaven a local habitation and a name.

From the place where he stood now, as his master and Dorr walked up and down, he could see the purplish haze beyond which the sentry had told him lay the North.  The North!  Just beyond the ridge.  There was a pain in his head, looking at it; his nerves grew cold and rigid, as yours do when something wrings your heart sharply:  for there are nerves in these black carcasses, thicker, more quickly stung to madness than yours.  Yet if any savage longing, smouldering for years, was heating to madness now in his brain, there was no sign of it in his face.  Vapid, with sordid content, the huge jaws munching tobacco slowly, only now and then the beady eye shot a sharp glance after Dorr.  The sentry had told him the Northern army had come to set the slaves free; he watched the Federal officer keenly.

“What ails you, Ben?” said his master.  “Thinking over your friend’s sermon?”

Ben’s stolid laugh was ready.

“Done forgot dat, Mars’.  Wouldn’t go, nohow.  Since Mars’ sold dat cussed Joe, gorry good times ‘t home.  Dam’ Abolitioner say we ums all goin’ Norf,”—­with a stealthy glance at Dorr.

“That’s more than your philanthropy bargains for, Charley,” laughed Lamar.