“Ugh!” said Ben, with a little shudder as he applied the poker to the blazing coals. “Well, go on, Nie.”
“When I got still a little stronger, we, the captain’s cousins and I, used to go for long rambles to the hills and woods, and sometimes south to a picnic or dance.
“There are giants in the forests of California, Ben. Once, I remember, our ball-room was the stump of an old tree, the lofty pines its walls, and the blue sky its roof.
“As I happened one day to let out rather inadvertently that I was, virtually speaking, a homeless man, a wanderer over the wide, wide world, my good host said bluntly, but kindly:
“‘Then, my dear sir, you are a prisoner here for the next six months. Come, I won’t take a word of denial.’
“Well, I had to give in, if only for the simple reason that both the girls added their influence to that of their father; I promised to stay, and didn’t repent it.
“Though I say it myself, Ben, I was soon a favourite with all the slaves about the old estate. I daresay I had my favourites among them; it is only natural. One of these was Shoe-Sally, another was Shoe-Sally’s little brother Tom. They were both characters in their way, and both oddities. Shoe-Sally was quite a personage about the old mansion. She seemed to do anything and everything, and to be here, there, and everywhere all at the same time. Shoe-Sally also knew everything, or appeared to do so, and she was just as black and shiny as the shoes she polished. Sally was bound up in a little brother of hers called Tom.
“‘Leetle tiny Tom,’ she told me one day, ‘is so cleber, sah. He read de good Book all same’s one parson, sah. Make parson hisself one o’ dem days. Sure he will, sah.’