You may cherish the fact in secret, but I would not advise
you to proclaim it openly just yet. You must wait until you go
away--to South Carolina."

"And can I learn to be a lawyer, sir?" asked the lad.

"It seems to me that you ought to be reasonably content for one day
with what you have learned already. You cannot be a lawyer until you
are white, in position as well as in theory, nor until you are
twenty-one years old. I need an office boy. If you are willing to
come into my office, sweep it, keep my books dusted, and stay here when
I am out, I do not care. To the rest of the town you will be my
servant, and still a negro. If you choose to read my books when no one
is about and be white in your own private opinion, I have no objection.
When you have made up your mind to go away, perhaps what you have read
may help you. But mum 's the word! If I hear a whisper of this from
any other source, out you go, neck and crop! I am willing to help you
make a man of yourself, but it can only be done under the rose."

For two years John Walden openly swept the office and surreptitiously
read the law books of old Judge Straight. When he was eighteen, he
asked his mother for a sum of money, kissed her good-by, and went out
into the world. When his sister, then a pretty child of seven, cried
because her big brother was going away, he took her up in his arms,
gave her a silver dime with a hole in it for a keepsake, hugged her
close, and kissed her.

"Nev' min', sis," he said soothingly. "Be a good little gal, an' some
o' these days I'll come back to see you and bring you somethin' fine."

In after years, when Mis' Molly was asked what had become of her son,
she would reply with sad complacency,--

"He's gone over on the other side."

As we have seen, he came back ten years later.

Many years before, when Mis' Molly, then a very young woman, had taken
up her residence in the house behind the cedars, the gentleman
heretofore referred to had built a cabin on the opposite corner, in
which he had installed a trusted slave by the name of Peter Fowler and
his wife Nancy. Peter was a good mechanic, and hired his time from his
master with the provision that Peter and his wife should do certain
work for Mis' Molly and serve as a sort of protection for her. In
course of time Peter, who was industrious and thrifty, saved enough
money to purchase his freedom and that of his wife and their one child,
and to buy the little