Sweet Anna! None who looked into her truthful, loving face, or knew the
beautiful consistency of her daily life, could doubt that whether
Presbyterian or Episcopal in sentiment, the heart was right and the feet
were treading the narrow path which leadeth unto life eternal.
It was a happy week spent at Terrace Hill; but one heart ached to its
very core when, at its close, Irving Stanley went back to where duty
called him, trusting that the God who had succored him thus far, would
shield him from future harm, and keep him safely till the coming autumn,
when, with the first falling of the leaf, he would gather to his embrace
his darling Adah, who, with every burden lifted from her spirits, had
grown in girlish beauty until others than himself marveled at her
strange loveliness.
* * * * *
On the white walls of a handsome country seat just on the banks of the
Connecticut, the light of the April sunset falls, and the soft April
wind kisses the fair cheek and lifts the golden curls of the young
mistress of Spring Bank--for so, in memory of the olden time, have they
named their new home--Hugh and Alice, who, arm in arm, walk up and down
the terraced garden, talking softly of the way they have been led, and
gratefully ascribing all praise to Him who rules and overrules, but does
nought save good to those who love Him.
Down in the meadow land and at the rear of the building, dusky forms are
seen--the negroes, who have come to their Northern home, and among them
the runaway, who, ashamed of his desertion, has returned to his former
master, resenting the name of contraband, and dismissing the
ultra-abolitionists as humbugs, who deserved putting in the front of
every battle. Hugh knows it will be hard accustoming these blacks to
Northern usages and ways of doing things, but as he has their good in
view as well as his own, and as they will not leave him, he feels sure
that in time he will succeed, and cares but little for the opinion of
those who wonder what he "expects to do with that lazy lot of niggers."
On a rustic seat, near a rear door, white-haired old Sam is sitting,
listening intently, while dusky Mug reads to him from the book of books,
the one he prizes above all else, stopping occasionally to expound, in
his own way, some point which he fancies may not be clear to her,
likening every good man to "Massah Hugh," and every bad one to the
leader of the "Suddern 'Federacy," whose horse he declares he held once
in "ole Virginny," telling Mug, in an aside, "how, if 'twasn't wicked,
nor agin' de scripter, he should most wish he'd put beech nuts under
Massah Jeffres' saddle, and so broke his fetched neck, 'fore he raise
sich a muss, runnin' calico so high that Miss Ellis 'clar she couldn't
'ford it, and axin' fifteen cents for a paltry spool of cotton."