id, "I
_will_ do it Scip; as God gives me strength, I _will_."

Reader, I am keeping my word.

CHAPTER XX.

CONCLUSION.

This is not a work of fiction. It is a record of facts, and therefore
the reader will not expect me to dispose of its various characters on
artistic principles--that is, lay them away in one of those final
receptacles for the creations of the romancer--the grave and matrimony.
Death has been among them, but nearly all are yet doing their work in
this breathing, busy world.

The characters I have introduced are real. They are not drawn with the
pencil of fancy, nor, I trust, colored with the tints of prejudice. The
scenes I have described are true. I have taken some liberties with the
names of persons and places, and, in a few instances, altered dates; but
the events themselves occurred under my own observation. No one
acquainted with the section of country I have described, or familiar
with the characters I have delineated, will question this statement.
Lest some one who has not seen the slave and the poor white man of the
South, as he actually is, should deem my picture overdrawn, I will say
that "the half has not been told!" If the whole were related--if the
Southern system, in all its naked ugliness, were fully exposed--the
truth would read like fiction, and the baldest relation of fact like
the wildest dream, of romance.

* * * * *

The overseer was never taken. A letter which I received from Colonel
J----, shortly prior to the stoppage of the mails, informed me that Moye
had succeeded in crossing the mountains into Tennessee, where, in an
interior town, he disposed of the horse, and then made his way by an
inland route to the free states. The horse the Colonel had recovered,
but the overseer he never expected to see. Moye is now, no doubt,
somewhere in the North, and is probably at this present writing a
zealous Union man, of somewhat the same "stripe" as the conductors of
the New York _Herald_ and the Boston _Courier_.

I have not heard directly from Scipio, but one day last July, after a
long search, I found on one of the wharves of South Street, a coasting
captain, who knew him well, and who had seen him the month previous at
Georgetown. He was at that time pursuing his usual avocations, and was
as much respected and trusted, as when I met him.

A few days after the tidings of the fall of Sumter were received in New
York, and when I had witnes