ow to the house, and as you tell me you have exchanged
clothes before now, you can do it again. What say you? I will give you
coat and breeches for your rags."

Thus generously supplied with clothes and other comforts by the good
knight, and implicitly relying upon the honor of so kind-hearted a man,
Israel cheered up, and in the course of two or three weeks had so
fattened his flanks, that he was able completely to fill Sir John's old
buckskin breeches, which at first had hung but loosely about him.

He was assigned to an occupation which removed him from the other
workmen. The strawberry bed was put under his sole charge. And often, of
mild, sunny afternoons, the knight, genial and gentle with dinner, would
stroll bare-headed to the pleasant strawberry bed, and have nice little
confidential chats with Israel; while Israel, charmed by the patriarchal
demeanor of this true Abrahamic gentleman, with a smile on his lip, and
tears of gratitude in his eyes, offered him, from time to time, the
plumpest berries of the bed.

When the strawberry season was over, other parts of the grounds were
assigned him. And so six months elapsed, when, at the recommendation of
Sir John, Israel procured a good berth in the garden of the Princess
Amelia.

So completely now had recent events metamorphosed him in all outward
things, that few suspected him of being any other than an Englishman.
Not even the knight's domestics. But in the princess's garden, being
obliged to work in company with many other laborers, the war was often
a topic of discussion among them. And "the d--d Yankee rebels" were not
seldom the object of scurrilous remark. Illy could the exile brook in
silence such insults upon the country for which he had bled, and for
whose honored sake he was that very instant a sufferer. More than once,
his indignation came very nigh getting the better of his prudence. He
longed for the war to end, that he might but speak a little bit of his
mind.

Now the superintendent of the garden was a harsh, overbearing man. The
workmen with tame servility endured his worst affronts. But Israel, bred
among mountains, found it impossible to restrain himself when made the
undeserved object of pitiless epithets. Ere two months went by, he
quitted the service of the princess, and engaged himself to a farmer in
a small village not far from Brentford. But hardly had he been here
three weeks, when a rumor again got afloat that he was a Yankee prisoner