e frying-pan
into the fire, and had not got a certain well-known Gentleman of the
Road to protect us against the French. But that, of course, made him
none the less useful to the Johnson's Nurse, when the little Miss
Johnsons were naughty.

"You leave off crying this minnit, Miss Jane, or I'll give you right
away to that horrid wicked officer. Jemima! just look out o' the
windy, if you please, and see if the Black Cap'n's a-com-ing with his
horse to carry away Miss Jane."

And there, sure enough, the Black Captain strode by, with his sword
clattering as if it did not know whose head to cut off first. But he
did not call for Miss Jane that time. He went on to the Green, where
he came so suddenly upon the eldest Master Johnson, sitting in a
puddle on purpose, in his new nankeen skeleton suit, that the young
gentleman thought judgment had overtaken him at last, and abandoned
himself to the howlings of despair. His howls were redoubled when he
was clutched from behind and swung over the Black Captain's shoulder,
but in five minutes his tears were stanched, and he was playing with
the officer's accoutrements. All of which the Grey Goose saw with her
own eyes, and heard afterwards that that bad boy had been whining to
go back to the Black Captain ever since, which showed how hardened he
was, and that nobody but Bonaparte himself could be expected to do him
any good.

But those were "trying times." It was bad enough when the pickle of a
large and respectable family cried for the Black Captain; when it came
to the little Miss Jessamine crying for him, one felt that the sooner
the French landed and had done with it the better.

The big Miss Jessamine's objection to him was that he was a soldier,
and this prejudice was shared by all the Green. "A soldier," as the
speaker from the town had observed, "is a bloodthirsty, unsettled sort
of a rascal; that the peaceable, home-loving, bread-winning citizen
can never conscientiously look on as a brother, till he has beaten his
sword into a ploughshare, and his spear into a pruning-hook."

On the other hand there was some truth in what the Postman (an old
soldier) said in reply; that the sword has to cut a way for us out of
many a scrape into which our bread-winners get us when they drive
their ploughshares into fallows that don't belong to them. Indeed,
whilst our most peaceful citizens were prosperous chiefly by means of
cotton, of sugar, and of the rise and fall of the money-mark