ore
respectful than I was.

To turn, for a moment, to a different scene, and to much humbler
persons, that pass and repass in the camera obscura of my early
recollections. The only Irishman that was in Sheffield, I think, in
those days, lived in my father's family for several years as a hired
man,--Richard; I knew him by no other name then, and recall him by no
other now,--the tallest and best-formed "exile of Erin" that I have ever
seen; prodigiously strong, yet always gentle in manner and speech to us
children; with the full brogue, and every way marked in my view, and set
apart from every one around him,--"a stranger in a strange land." The
only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he
made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he
had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for
a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony
and respect in the great kitchen fireplace. With our absurd New England
Puritan ways, yet naturally derived from the times of the English
Commonwealth, when any observance of Christmas was made penal and
punished with [24] imprisonment, I am not sure that we should have known
anything of Christmas, but for Richard's Yule-log.

There was another class of persons who were frequently engaged to do
day's work on the farm,--that of the colored people. Some of them had
been slaves here in Sheffield. They were virtually emancipated by our
State Bill of Rights, passed in 1783. The first of them that sought
freedom under it, and the first, it is said, that obtained it in New
England, was a female slave of General Ashley, and her advocate in the
case was Mr. Sedgwick, afterwards Judge Sedgwick, who was then a lawyer
in Sheffield.

There were several of the men that stand out as pretty marked
individualities in my memory, Peter and Caesar and Will and Darby; merry
old fellows they seemed to be,--I see no laborers so cheerful and gay
now,--and very faithful and efficient workers. Peter and his wife, Toah
(so was she called), had belonged to my maternal grandfather, and were
much about us, helping, or being helped, as the case might be. They both
lived and died in their own cottage, pleasantly situated on the bank of
Skenob Brook. They tilled their own garden, raised their own "sarse,"
kept their own cow; and I have heard one say that "Toah's garden had the
finest damask roses in the world, and her house, and all