s your true interests at heart, and if you will be careful to avoid
strangers who try to talk to you, you 'll stand a fair chance of getting
back to your home and your friends. And if you please your master Dick,
he 'll buy you a present, and a string of beads for Betty to wear when
you and she get married in the fall."

"Thanky, marster, thanky, suh," replied Grandison, oozing gratitude at
every pore; "you is a good marster, to be sho', suh; yas, 'deed you is.
You kin jes' bet me and Mars Dick gwine git 'long jes' lack I wuz own
boy ter Mars Dick. En it won't be my fault ef he don' want me fer his
boy all de time, w'en we come back home ag'in."

"All right, Grandison, you may go now. You need n't work any more
to-day, and here 's a piece of tobacco for you off my own plug."

"Thanky, marster, thanky, marster! You is de bes' marster any nigger
ever had in dis worl'." And Grandison bowed and scraped and disappeared
round the corner, his jaws closing around a large section of the
colonel's best tobacco.

"You may take Grandison," said the colonel to his son. "I allow he 's
abolitionist-proof."

III

Richard Owens, Esq., and servant, from Kentucky, registered at the
fashionable New York hostelry for Southerners in those days, a hotel
where an atmosphere congenial to Southern institutions was sedulously
maintained. But there were negro waiters in the dining-room, and mulatto
bell-boys, and Dick had no doubt that Grandison, with the native
gregariousness and garrulousness of his race, would foregather and
palaver with them sooner or later, and Dick hoped that they would
speedily inoculate him with the virus of freedom. For it was not Dick's
intention to say anything to his servant about his plan to free him, for
obvious reasons. To mention one of them, if Grandison should go away,
and by legal process be recaptured, his young master's part in the
matter would doubtless become known, which would be embarrassing to
Dick, to say the least. If, on the other hand, he should merely give
Grandison sufficient latitude, he had no doubt he would eventually lose
him. For while not exactly skeptical about Grandison's perfervid
loyalty, Dick had been a somewhat keen observer of human nature, in his
own indolent way, and based his expectations upon the force of the
example and argument that his servant could scarcely fail to encounter.
Grandison should have a fair chance to become free by his own
initiative; if it should beco