"Ea! sus! it is boyish to burn the old lad. I have had many a blow from a black, and stab, too. A dog will bite you if you lasso him."
"No nigger can knock me down and git off with selling."
"Then you are a bad trader. The negro's price is all the negro is; why make him your equal by hating him?"
"I am a Delaware boy," Joe Johnson said, "and it's the pride with me to give no nigger a chance. In Maryland you pets 'em, like ole Colonel Ned Lloyd over yer on the Wye; he's give his nigger coachman a gole watch an' chain because he's his son! What a nimenog! Some day he'll raise a nigger that'll be makin' politikle speeches, an' then I don't want to live no more."[5]
"Chito! Since the Delaware lawyer sent you to the post, son-in-law, you're morose. I have had to eat with negro princes, dance with their queens, and be ceremonious as if they had been angels."
"It would be the reign of Queen Dick for me! I couldn't do it, nohow."
"And, by the way, Joseph, I may see your friend, the lawyer Clayton, at Dover, to-night: he may send me to the post, too; and I fear no Delaware governor will take off the cropping of my ears, as was done for you in state patriotism."
"Beware of that imp of Tolobon!" Joe Johnson muttered. "How I wish you could kill him, Van Dorn. He's got to be a senator; some day he'll be chief-justice of Delaware: then, what'll niggers be wuth thar?"
"I fancy, Joseph, you might be a legislator in Delaware if your inclinations ran that way?"
"Easy enough, but I makes legislators. My wife, Margaretta—her first husband's sister is the wife of the chancellor."