n't help thinkin' yon white spots down this side of
the river air Sharptown. If that's the case, which state am I in?"

He rose to his feet, bailed the scow, which was nearly full of water,
and began to paddle along the shore, and, seeing something white, he
landed and parted the bushes, and found it to be a stone of a bluish
marble, bearing on one side the letter M, and on the other the letter P,
and a royal crown was also carved upon it.

"Yer's one o' Lord Baltimore's boundary stones," Phoebus exclaimed.
"Now see the rascality o' them kidnappers! Yon house, I know, is
Twiford's, because it's a'most on the state-line, but, I'm ashamed to
say, it's a leetle in Maryland. And that lane, coming down to the wharf,
is my way to Joe Johnson's Pangymonum at his cross-roads."

A sound, as of some one singing, seemed to come from the woods near by,
and Phoebus, listening, concluded that it was farther along the water,
so he paddled softly forward till a small cove or pool led up into the
swamp, and its shores nowhere offered a dry landing; yet there were
recent foot-marks deeply trodden in the bog, and disclosed up the slope
into the woods, and from their direction seemed to come the mysterious
chanting.

"My head's bloody and I'm wet as a musk-rat, so I reckon I ain't afraid
of gittin' a little muddy," and with this the navigator stepped from the
scow in swamp nearly to his middle, and pulled himself up the slope by
main strength.

"I believe my soul this yer is a island," Jimmy remarked; "a island
surrounded with mud, that's wuss to git to than a water island."

The tall trees increased in size as he went on and entered a noble grove
of pines, through whose roar, like an organ accompanied by a human
voice, the singing was heard nearer and nearer, and, following the track
of previous feet, which had almost made a path, Phoebus came to a
space where an axe had laid the smaller bushes low around a large
loblolly pine that spread its branches like a roof only a few feet from
the ground; and there, fastened by a chain to the trunk, which allowed
her to go around and around the tree, and tread a nearly bare place in
the pine droppings or "shats," sat a black woman, singing in a long,
weary, throat-sore wail. Jimmy listened to a few lines:

"Deep-en de woun' dy han's have made
In dis weak, helpless soul,
Till mercy wid its mighty aid
De-scen to make me whole;
Yes, Lord!
De-scen to make me whole.