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