“I don’t know but what they were girls.  I think they were.”

“Now mars Clay, you knows bettern dat.  Sometimes a body can’t tell whedder you’s a sayin’ what you means or whedder you’s a sayin’ what you don’t mean, ’case you says ’em bofe de same way.”

“But how should I know whether they were boys or girls?”

“Goodness sakes, mars Clay, don’t de Good Book say?  ’Sides, don’t it call ’em de he-brew chil’en?  If dey was gals wouldn’t dey be de she-brew chil’en?  Some people dat kin read don’t ’pear to take no notice when dey do read.”

“Well, Uncle Dan’l, I think that-----My!  here comes another one up the
river!   There can’t be two!”

“We gone dis time—­we done gone dis time, sho’!  Dey ain’t two, mars Clay—­days de same one.  De Lord kin ’pear eberywhah in a second.  Goodness, how do fiah and de smoke do belch up!  Dat mean business, honey.  He comin’ now like he fo’got sumfin.  Come ’long, chil’en, time you’s gwyne to roos’.  Go ’long wid you—­ole Uncle Daniel gwyne out in de woods to rastle in prah—­de ole nigger gwyne to do what he kin to sabe you agin”

He did go to the woods and pray; but he went so far that he doubted, himself, if the Lord heard him when He went by.

CHAPTER IV.

—­Seventhly, Before his Voyage, He should make his peace with God, satisfie his Creditors if he be in debt; Pray earnestly to God to prosper him in his Voyage, and to keep him from danger, and, if he be ‘sui juris’ he should make his last will, and wisely order all his affairs, since many that go far abroad, return not home. (This good and Christian Counsel is given by Martinus Zeilerus in his Apodemical Canons before his Itinerary of Spain and Portugal.)

Early in the morning Squire Hawkins took passage in a small steamboat, with his family and his two slaves, and presently the bell rang, the stage-plank; was hauled in, and the vessel proceeded up the river.  The children and the slaves were not much more at ease after finding out that this monster was a creature of human contrivance than they were the night before when they thought it the Lord of heaven and earth.  They started, in fright, every time the gauge-cocks sent out an angry hiss, and they quaked from head to foot when the mud-valves thundered.  The shivering of the boat under the beating of the wheels was sheer misery to them.

But of course familiarity with these things soon took away their terrors, and then the voyage at once became a glorious adventure, a royal progress through the very heart and home of romance, a realization of their rosiest wonder-dreams.  They sat by the hour in the shade of the pilot house on the hurricane deck and looked out over the curving expanses of the river sparkling in the sunlight.  Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current, with a verdant world on either hand, and remote from both; sometimes she