CHAPTER VII.
TWO MEN WHO LOOK ALIKE.
I, to the world, am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
So I, to find a mother, and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.
—Shakespeare.
Mr. George Waters, the escaped slave from Virginia, lived very quietly at the home of Mrs. Stevens. His daughter was constantly with him, save when he made strange and unknown pilgrimages. During these mysterious visits, she stayed at the house of Mrs. Stevens.
Cora was a quiet little maid, whose hopes seemed crushed by some calamity. She never forgot that her father, the once proud man, had been arrested and sold as a slave. That long period of servitude, the flight and the fight were things which never faded from her mind. In the eyes of Charles Stevens, there was something singularly attractive about this child. She was so strange, so silent and melancholy, that he felt for her the keenest sympathy. She lived in the shadow of some dark mystery, which he could not fathom. Her strange father was non-communicative and silent as the grave.
Charles felt an interest in these people. It was a strange interest, one he could not understand himself, and like all good boys, when he wanted wisdom and information, he went to his mother.
"Mother, do you ever talk with Cora?" he asked one day.
"Yes."
"Do you ever talk with her about England?"
"I have; but it seems her father was a roving player, without any fixed abode."