ge of self, and was sleeping again at Samson's
side. She dreamed of innumerable angels flying all around her, and yet
their voices were so harsh they awoke her at last, and still these
seraphs were flying in the day. She saw their wings, and moved the old
man at her side to say,

"Samson, why cannot these angels sing?"

The old man looked up and faintly smiled:

"Poor Virgie, dey is wild-fowls, all bewildered by dat storm: geese and
swans. Dey can't sing like angels."

"Yes," said the girl; "something sings, I know. What is it?"

"Jesus, maybe," the negro answered, looking at her, his eyes full of
tears.

* * * * *

The great Breakwater, which required forty years and nearly a million
tons of stone to build it, was then just commencing, and where it was to
be, within the shallow bight of Henlopen, they saw the wrecks of many
vessels, some sunken, some shattered in collision, some stranded in the
marsh, proving the needs of commerce for such a work, and also the fury
of the storm that had so innocently vanished, like a sleeping tiger
after his bloody meal.

In the gentle sunshine floated the American flag upon several vessels
there--the flag that first kissed the breeze upon that spot in the year
1776, when Esek Hopkins raised over the _Alfred_ the dyes of the peach
and cream in the centre of his little squadron. And there, along the low
bluff of the Kill, still lay the shingle-boarded town of Lewes, in the
torpor of nearly two hundred years, or since the Dutch De Vries had
settled it in 1631. Lord Delaware, Argall, and the Swede, Penn,
Blackbeard, Paul Jones, Lord Rodney, a thousand heroes, had known it
well; the pilots, like sea-gulls, had their nests there; the Marylanders
had invaded it, the Tories had seized it, pirates had been suckled
there; and now the courts and lawyers had forsaken it, to go inland to
Georgetown.

"Virgie," said Samson, "I'll try to buy some of de stone-boat captains
to carry you to Phildelfy."

He waded the Kill, carrying her, and left her in an old Presbyterian
church at the skirt of Lewes, and procured medicine for her, and then
labored in vain nearly all day to get her passage to a free state. The
reply was invariable: "Can't take the risk of the whippin'-post and
pillory for no nigger. Can't lose a long job like bringin' stone to the
Breakwater to save one nigger."

At the hotel a colored man beckoned Samson aside--a fine-looking man, of
a ging