In my room she grew queerly playful, and continued so until she had drawn off my shoes and stockings.  But then abruptly, she took my feet in her slim black hands, and with eyes lifted tenderly to mine, said:  “How bu’ful ‘pon de mountain is dem wha’ funnish good tidin’s!” She leaned her forehead on my insteps:  “Us bleeged to paht some day, Miss Maud.”

I made a poor effort to lift her, but she would not be displaced.  “Cayn’t no two people count fo’ sho’ on stayin’ togetheh al’ays in dis va-ain worl’,” and all at once I found my face in my hands and the salt drops searching through my fingers; Sidney was kissing my feet and wetting them with her tears.

At close of the next day, a Sabbath, my uncle and aunt called all their servants around the front steps of the house and with tears more bitter than any of Sidney’s or mine, told them that by the folly of others, far away, they had lost their whole fortune at one stroke and must part with everything, and with them, by sale.  Their dark hearers wept with them, and Silas, Hester, and Sidney, after the rest had gone back to the quarters, offered the master and mistress, through many a quaintly misquoted scripture, the consolations of faith.

“I wish we had set you free, Silas,” said uncle, “you and yours, when we could have done it.  Your mistress and I are going to town to-morrow solely to get somebody to buy you, all four, together.”

“Mawse Ben,” cried the slave, with strange earnestness, “don’t you do dat!  Don’t you was’e no time dat a-way!  You go see what you can sa-ave fo’ you-all an’ yone!”

“For the creditors, you mean, Silas,” said my aunt; “that’s done.”

Hester had a question.  “Do it all go to de credito’s anyhow, Miss ’Liza, no matteh how much us bring?” and when aunt said yes, Sidney murmured to her mother, “I tol’ you dat.”  I wondered when she had told her.

Uncle and aunt tried hard to find one buyer for the four, but failed; nobody who wanted the other three had any use for Mingo.  It was after nightfall when they came dragging home.  “Now don’t you fret one bit ’bout dat, Mawse Ben,” exclaimed Sidney, with a happy heroism in her eyes that I remembered afterward. “‘De Lawd is perwide!’”

“Strange,” said my aunt to uncle and me aside, smiling in pity, “how slight an impression disaster makes on their minds!” and that too I remembered afterward.

As soon as we were alone in my chamber, Sidney and I, she asked me to tell her again of the clock in the sky, and at the end of her service and of my recital she drew me to my window and showed me how promptly she could point out the pole-star at the centre of the clock’s vast dial, although at our right a big moon was leaving the tree tops and flooding the sky with its light.  Toward this she turned, and lifting an arm with the reverence of a priestess said, in impassioned monotone: 

  “‘De moon shine full at His comman’
      An’ all de stahs obey.’”