beside himself, if you only set him where he could see his eyes tally and watch his hands explain.  What a head he has got!  When he got up that idea there in Virginia of buying up whole loads of negroes in Delaware and Virginia and Tennessee, very quiet, having papers drawn to have them delivered at a place in Alabama and take them and pay for them, away yonder at a certain time, and then in the meantime get a law made stopping everybody from selling negroes to the south after a certain day —­it was somehow that way—­mercy how the man would have made money!  Negroes would have gone up to four prices.  But after he’d spent money and worked hard, and traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn’t get the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled.  And there in Kentucky, when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business, why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the doors bolted and the candle in an empty barrel.  Oceans of money in it —­anybody could see that.  But it did cost a deal to buy the old numskull out—­and then when they put the new cog wheel in they’d overlooked something somewhere and it wasn’t any use—­the troublesome thing wouldn’t go.  That notion he got up here did look as handy as anything in the world; and how him and Si did sit up nights working at it with the curtains down and me watching to see if any neighbors were about.  The man did honestly believe there was a fortune in that black gummy oil that stews out of the bank Si says is coal; and he refined it himself till it was like water, nearly, and it did burn, there’s no two ways about that; and I reckon he’d have been all right in Cincinnati with his lamp that he got made, that time he got a house full of rich speculators to see him exhibit only in the middle of his speech it let go and almost blew the heads off the whole crowd.  I haven’t got over grieving for the money that cost yet.  I am sorry enough Beriah Sellers is in Missouri, now, but I was glad when he went.  I wonder what his letter says.  But of course it’s cheerful; he’s never down-hearted—­never had any trouble in his life—­didn’t know it if he had.  It’s always sunrise with that man, and fine and blazing, at that—­never gets noon; though—­leaves off and rises again.  Nobody can help liking the creature, he means so well—­but I do dread to come across him again; he’s bound to set us all crazy, of coarse.  Well, there goes old widow Hopkins—­it always takes her a week to buy a spool of thread and trade a hank of yarn.  Maybe Si can come with the letter, now.”

And he did: 

“Widow Hopkins kept me—­I haven’t any patience with such tedious people.  Now listen, Nancy—­just listen at this: