valuable bargain home in--"I wonder what on earth made Isaacs run off
like a maniac."

"Massa," whispered Peter, "yesterday I jes' caught yer Brer Hornet
a-loafin' around in the wood. 'Come wi' me,' says I, 'and bottled him in
this yer pasteboard box,'" showing one which had held Turkish tobacco.
"When I saw that Hebrew Jew wouldn't stir his pencil, I jes' crept up
softly and dropped Brer Hornet down his neck. Then he jes' rose and
went. Spec's he and Brer Hornet had business of their own."

"Peter," said Moore, "you are a good boy, but you will come to a bad
end."

II.

As we rode slowly homeward, behind the trap which conveyed the
dear-bought slave, Moore was extremely moody and disinclined for
conversation.

"Is your purchase not rather an expensive one?" I ventured to ask, to
which Moore replied shortly--

"No; think he is perhaps the cheapest nigger that was ever bought."

To put any more questions would have been impertinent, and I possessed my
curiosity in silence till we reached the plantation.

Here Moore's conduct became decidedly eccentric. He had the black man
conveyed at once into a cool, dark, strong room with a heavy iron door,
where the new acquisition was locked up in company with a sufficient
meal. Moore and I dined hastily, and then he summoned all his negroes
together into the court of the house. "Look here, boys," he cried: "all
these trees"--and he pointed to several clumps "must come down
immediately, and all the shrubs on the lawn and in the garden. Fall to
at once, those of you that have axes, and let the rest take hoes and
knives and make a clean sweep of the shrubs." The idea of wholesale
destruction seemed not disagreeable to the slaves, who went at their work
with eagerness, though it made my heart ache to see the fine old oaks
beginning to fall and to watch the green garden becoming a desert. Moore
first busied himself with directing the women, who, under his orders,
piled up mattresses and bags of cotton against the parapets of the
verandahs. The house stood on the summit of a gradually sloping height,
and before the moon began to set (for we worked without intermission
through the evening and far into the night) there was nothing but a bare
slope of grass all round the place, while smoke and flame went up from
the piles of fallen timber. The plantation, in fact, was ready to stand
a short siege.

Moore now produced a number of rifles, which he put, with ammuni