He said this very quietly, and sat up on the edge of the bed, his feet hanging down, and his hand stretched out towards her.

“Honey,” she explained, coaxingly, from where she stood, “can’t you sobah up a little en put on yo’ clo’es? I gwine to tek you ’way to de country. You don’ wan’ no tools. You can’ dig no cellahs now. De chol’ra’s in town en de people’s dyin’ like sheep.”

“I expect they will need me,” he answered.

She perceived now that he was sober. For an instant her own fear was forgotten in an outburst of resentment and indignation.

“Dig graves fuh ’em, when dey put you up on de block en sell you same ez you wuz a niggah! Dig graves fuh ’em, when dey allers callin’ you names on de street en makin’ fun o’ you!”

“They are not to blame. I have brought it on myself.”

“But we can’ stay heah en die o’ de chol’ra!”

“You mustn’t stay. You must go away at once.”

“But if I go, who gwine tek cyah o’ you?”

“Nobody.”

She came quickly across the room to the bed, fell on her knees, clasped his feet to her breast, and looked up into his face with an expression of imploring tenderness. Then, with incoherent cries and with sobs and tears, she pleaded with him—pleaded for dear life; his and her own.

It was a strange scene. What historian of the heart will ever be able to do justice to those peculiar ties which bound the heart of the negro in years gone by to a race of not always worthy masters? This old Virginia nurse had known King Solomon when he was a boy playing with her young master, till that young master died on the way to Kentucky.

At the death of her mistress she had become free with a little property. By thrift and industry she had greatly enlarged this. Years passed and she became the only surviving member of the Virginian household, which had emigrated early in the century to the Blue-grass Region. The same wave of emigration had brought in old King Solomon from the same neighborhood. As she had risen in life, he had sunk. She sat on the sidewalks selling her fruits and cakes; he sat on the sidewalks more idle, more ragged and dissolute. On no other basis than these facts she began to assume a sort of maternal pitying care of him, patching his rags, letting him have money for his vices, and when, a year or two before, he had ceased working almost entirely, giving him a room in her house and taking in payment what he chose to pay.

He brushed his hand quickly across his eyes as she knelt before him now, clasping his feet to her bosom. From coaxing him as an intractable child, she had, in the old servile fashion, fallen to imploring him, with touching forgetfulness of their real relations:

“O my marseter! O my marseter Solomon! Go ’way en save yo’ life, en tek yo’ po’ ole niggah wid you!”

But his resolution was formed, and he refused to go. A hurried footstep paused beneath the window and a loud voice called up. The old nurse got up and went to the window. A man was standing by the cart at her door.

“For God’s sake, let me have this cart to take my wife and little children away to the country! There is not a vehicle to be had in town. I will pay you—” He stopped, seeing the distress on her face.