Bank
of Somerset. Pore an' foolish as you air, maybe your ole bell-crowns
will ruin you."

The road to Salisbury--laid out in 1667, when "Cecil, Lord of Maryland
and Avalon," erected a county "in honor of our dear sister, the Lady
Mary Somerset"--followed the beaver-dams across the little river-heads,
and pierced the flat pine-woods and open farms, and passed through two
little hamlets, before our travellers saw the broad mill-ponds and
poplar and mulberry lined streets of the most active town--albeit
without a court-house--in the lower peninsula. Jimmy Phoebus, driving
the two horses and the family carriage, and Samson, following on his
mule, descended into the hollow of Salisbury at the dinner-hour, and
stopped at the hotel. The snore of grist-mills, the rasp of mill-saws,
the flow of pine-colored breast-water into the gorge of the village, the
forest cypress-trees impudently intruding into the obliquely-radiating
streets, and humidity of ivy and creeper over many of the old,
gable-chimneyed houses, the long lumber-yards reflected in the swampy
harbor among the canoes, pungies, and sharpies moored there, the small
houses sidewise to the sandy streets, the larger ones rising up the
sandy hills, the old box-bush in the silvery gardens, the bridges close
together, and the smell of tar and sawdust pleasantly inhaled upon the
lungs, made a combination like a caravan around some pool in the Desert
of the Nile.

"If there is any chance to catch my negroes," Mrs. Custis said, "I will
go right on after dinner. Samson, send Dave, my daughter's boy, to me
immediately; he is working in this hotel."

Samson found Dave to be none other than the black class-leader he had
failed to overcome at the beginning of our narrative, but changes were
visible in that individual Samson had not expected. From having a clean,
godly, modest countenance, becoming his professions, Dave now wore a
sour, evil look; his eyes were blood-shotten, and his straight, manly
shoulders and chest, which had once exacted Samson's admiration and
envy, were stooped to conform with a cough he ever and anon made from
deep in his frame.

"Dave," said Samson, "your missis's modder wants you, boy, to drive her
to Vienny. What ails you, Dave, sence I larned you to box?"

"Is you de man?" Dave exclaimed, hoarsely; "den may de Lord forgive you,
fur _I_ never kin. Dat lickin' I mos' give you, made me a po', wicked,
backslidin' fool."

"Why, Dave, I jess saw you was