"They'll turn me back at Princess Anne, and wont know me, maybe."

"Not if you do this, Mary. Make them take you to Judge Custis's daughter - the one that's just been married. Tell her you want to speak to her privately. Then tell her the nigger-skinned man - I'm him - that she sent away with her mother, found you whar you was chained in the woods. Take this link of the chain to show her. Tell her you want to be her cook till the one that run away is found."

"I'll do it, sir. I've got no home to go to, now."

"Tell her all you remember. Tell her not to tell Ellenory any of my troubles. Tell her I'm a-startin' for Pangymonum, an', if I die, it's nothin' but a bachelor keepin' his own solitary company. Yer's a gold piece an' three silver pieces I found, Mary, to pay your way. Good-bye."

"Won't you give me your knife?" asked the woman.

"What fur, Mary?"

"To kill myself if they kidnap me again."

"I have nothin' else to fight for my life with," said Phoebus. "No, you must not do that. Keep in the woods to Laurel."

She fell on the ground and kissed his knees, and bathed them with her tears.

"I do have faith, master," she said, "faith enough to be your slave."

"I'd cry a little, too," said Jimmy, twitching his eyes, as the woman disappeared in the forest, "if I knowed how to do it; but, by smoke! the wind on the bay's dried up my tear ponds. I'll bury these curiosities right yer, with this chain and ball, and put some old bricks around' em outen the chimney they come from."

He dug a hole with his knife, carefully cutting out a piece of the sod, and restoring it over the buried articles; and, after notching some trees to mark the place, he pushed in the scow again into Broad Creek, and descended the Nanticoke on the falling tide to Twiford's wharf.

Dragging the scow up the bed of a creek to conceal it, he discovered another boundary stone. A beach led under the cover of a sandy bluff to the river gate of Twiford's comfortable house, and he boldly entered the lane and lawn, saying to himself:

"I reckon a feller can ask to buy one squar meal a day in a free country, fur I'm hungry."

Even in that day the house was probably seventy years old, roofed by an artistic shingler in lines like old lace-work, the short roofs over the three pretty dormers like laced bib-aprons, the window-casements in small checkers of dark glass, the roof capacious as an armadillo's back or land-turtle's; but half of it was almost as straight as the walls, and the small, foreign bricks in the gables, glazed black and dark-red alternately, were laid by conscientious workmen, and bade fair to stand another hundred years, as they smoked their tidy chimney pipes from hearty stomachs of fireplaces below.

Standing beneath the honey-locust tree at the lawn-gate, the sailor beheld an extensive prospect of the river Nanticoke, bending in a beautiful curve, like the rim of a silver salver, towards the south, the blue perspective of the surrounding woods fading into the azure bluffs on the farther shore, where, as he now identified it, the hamlet of Sharptown assumed the mystery and similitude of a city by the enchantment of distance. A large brig was riding up the river under the afternoon breeze, carrying the English flag at her spanker. The wild-fowl, flying in V-formed lines, like Hyads astray, flickered on the salver of the river like house-flies. Some fishermen distantly appeared, human, yet nearly stationary, as if to enliven a dream, and the bees in a row of hives kept murmuring near by, increasing the restful sense in the heart and the ears.