on his head.  I had another friend who lived near us.  When he was nineteen years old he did not know how many letters there were in the ABC’s.  One night, when his work was done, his boss came into his cabin and saw him with a book in his hand.  He threatened to give him five hundred lashes if he caught him again with a book, and said he hadn’t work enough to do.  He was getting out logs, and his task was ten logs a day.  His employer threatened to increase it to twelve.  He said it just harassed him; it set him on fire.  He thought there must be something good in that book if the white man didn’t want him to learn.  One day he had an errand in the kitchen, and he heard one of the colored girls going over the ABC’s.  Here was the key to the forbidden knowledge.  She had heard the white children saying them, and picked them up by heart, but did not know them by sight.  He was not content with that, but sold his cap for a book and wore a cloth on his head instead.  He got the sounds of the letters by heart, then cut off the bark of a tree, carved the letters on the smooth inside, and learned them.  He wanted to learn how to write.  He had charge of a warehouse where he had a chance to see the size and form of letters.  He made the beach of the river his copybook, and thus he learned to write.  Tom never got very far with his learning, but I used to get the papers and tell him all I knew about the war.”

“How did you get the papers?”

“I used to have very good privileges for a slave.  All of our owners were not alike.  Some of them were quite clever, and others were worse than git out.  I used to get the morning papers to sell to the boarders and others, and when I got them I would contrive to hide a paper, and let some of the fellow-servants know how things were going on.  And our owners thought we cared nothing about what was going on.”

“How was that?  I thought you were not allowed to hold meetings unless a white man were present.”

“That was so.  But we contrived to hold secret meetings in spite of their caution.  We knew whom we could trust.  My ole Miss wasn’t mean like some of them.  She never wanted the patrollers around prowling in our cabins, and poking their noses into our business.  Her husband was an awful drunkard.  He ran through every cent he could lay his hands on, and she was forced to do something to keep the wolf from the door, so she set up a boarding-house.  But she didn’t take in Tom, Dick, and Harry.  Nobody but the big bugs stopped with her.  She taught me to read and write, and to cast up accounts.  It was so handy for her to have some one who could figure up her accounts, and read or write a note, if she were from home and wanted the like done.  She once told her cousin how I could write and figure up.  And what do you think her cousin said?”

“‘Pleased,’ I suppose, ‘to hear it.’”

“Not a bit of it.  She said, if I belonged to her, she would cut off my thumbs; her husband said, ‘Oh, then he couldn’t pick cotton.’  As to my poor thumbs, it did not seem to be taken into account what it would cost me to lose them.  My ole Miss used to have a lot of books.  She would let me read any one of them except a novel.  She wanted to take care of my soul, but she wasn’t taking care of her own.”