and couldn't help
being,--and, finally, by a bitter break with his father, in which came
that last wrench for an individual existence which some time or other
the young growing mind will give to old authority,--by all these united,
was the lot at length cast; for one evening James was missing at
supper, missing by the fireside, gone all night, not at home to
breakfast,--till, finally, a strange, weird, most heathenish-looking
cabin-boy, who had often been forbidden the premises by Mr. Marvyn,
brought in a letter, half-defiant, half-penitent, which announced that
James had sailed in the "Ariel" the evening before.

Mr. Zebedee Marvyn set his face as a flint, and said, "He went out from
us because he was not of us,"--whereat old Candace lifted her great
floury fist from the kneading-trough, and, shaking it like a large
snowball, said, "Oh, you go 'long, Massa Marvyn; ye'll live to count dat
ar' boy for de staff o' your old age yet, now I tell ye; got de makin'
o' ten or'nary men in him; kittles dat's full allers will bile over;
good yeast will blow out de cork,--lucky ef it don't bust de bottle.
Tell ye, der's angels has der hooks in sich, and when de Lord wants him
dey'll haul him in safe and sound." And Candace concluded her speech by
giving a lift to her whole batch of dough and flinging it down in the
trough with an emphasis that made the pewter on the dresser rattle.

This apparently irreverent way of expressing her mind, so contrary to
the deferential habits studiously inculcated in family discipline, had
grown to be so much a matter of course to all the family that nobody
ever thought of rebuking it. There was a sort of savage freedom about
her which they excused in right of her having been born and bred a
heathen, and of course not to be expected to come at once under the yoke
of civilization. In fact, you must all have noticed, my dear readers,
that there are some sorts of people for whom everybody turns out as they
would for a railroad-car, without stopping to ask why, and Candace was
one of them.

Moreover, Mr. Marvyn was not displeased with this defence of James,
as might be inferred from his mentioning it four or five times in the
course of the morning, to say how foolish it was,--wondering why it was
that Candace and everybody else got so infatuated with that boy,--and
ending, at last, after a long period of thought, with the remark, that
these poor African creatures often seemed to have a great deal of
s