Oleah, two years younger, and not quite so tall, is yet in physical strength his brother's equal. He has the dark hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes of his Southern mother.
The brothers were alike and yet dissimilar. They had shared equally the same advantages; they had played together and studied together. Playmates in their childhood, friends as well as brothers in their young manhood, no one could question a doubt of their brotherly love. Where one had been, the other had always been at his side. No slightest difference had ever yet ruffled the smooth surface of their existence. Yet they were dissimilar in temperament. Abner was slow and cool, but perhaps more determined than his brother, and his reason predominated over his prejudice. Oleah was rash, impetuous and bold, and more liable to be moved by prejudice or passion than by reason. Abner was the exact counterpart of his Northern father, Oleah of his Southern mother.
Their political sympathies were different as their dispositions. Although of the same family, they had actually been taught opposite political creeds—one parent in a half-playful way, unconsciously advocating one idea; the other as firmly and unconsciously upholding another, and it was quite natural that the children should follow them. But this difference of opinion had bred no discord.
Sixteen years have wrought a wonderful change in Irene, the foundling. Her parentage is still a mystery, and she bears the name of her foster parents. She is just budding into womanhood, and a beautiful woman she promises to make—slender and graceful, her small, shapely head crowned with dark brown hair, her cheeks dimpling with smiles, mouth and chin firm and clear-cut and large, dark-gray eyes beneath arching brows and long silken lashes filled with a world of tenderness.
Irene could not have been loved more tenderly by the planter and his wife had she been their own child. They lavished care and affection upon her and filled her life with everything that could minister to her comfort and delight, and every one knew that they would make generous provision for the little waif who had gained so sure a place in their hearts.
Sixteen years had made some change in the planter. His hair had grown whiter, his brow more furrowed with care, and he went about with a heavy cane; yet he was vigorous and energetic. He had grown more corpulent, and his movements were less brisk than of yore. Father Time had dealt leniently with his wife. Her soft, dark hair was scarcely touched with silver; her cheeks were smooth and her eyes were still bright and lustrous. Her voice had lost none of its silver ring, her manner none of its queenly grace.
No ray of light had pierced the darkened mind of Crazy Joe. All these long, weary years he had been waiting, waiting, waiting, for his father Jacob to come down into Egypt, but he came not. He still talked as if it was but yesterday that he had been cast into the pit by his brethren, and then taken out and sold into Egypt. He spent his time in turns at the planter's and Uncle Dan's cabin. He was well known throughout the neighborhood, and pitied and kindly treated by all. His strange hallucination, although causing pain and perplexity to his shattered mind, worked no change in his gentle disposition; his sad eyes never flashed with anger; no emotion varied the melancholy monotone of his voice. When at the home of the planter, Joe divided his time between the stables, the garden and the library. He would have been a constant reader of the Bible, Josephus, Socrates, Milton's "Paradise Lost," had it not been discovered by Mrs. Tompkins that these books only tended to increase the darkness in which his mind was shrouded, and she had them kept from him. At Uncle Dan's mountain home he passed his time in hunting and trapping, becoming expert in both.
Sixteen years had wrought a great change in Uncle Dan, bowing his tall and sinewy form. His face, which he had always kept smooth shaven, had grown sharper and thinner, and his long hair hanging about his shoulders, had turned from black to gray; yet his eye was as true and his hand as steady as when, in his youthful days, he carried away the prize at the shooting match. His visits to the plantation became more frequent and his stays longer, for the old man grew lonesome in his hut, and he was ever a welcome guest at the Tompkins mansion.
Sixteen years had made a wonderful transformation in the politics of the country. The Whig party had been swallowed up by the Republican or Abolition organization. The seeds of freedom, sown by Clarkson, Brown and others, had taken root, and, in the Fall of 1860, bade fare to ripen into a bounteous harvest. The Southern feeling against the North had grown more and more bitter, and the low, rumbling thunders of a mighty storm might have been heard—a storm not far distant, and whose fury naught but the blood of countless thousands could assuage.
"In the beginning, God created Heaven and the earth, and all that was in them, in six days, and rested on the seventh."