The soul of one of its ancient inhabitants, yet wandering upon this earth, may through transmigration have become in part your own, and you, in reverie at odd hours and in company with it, live again a few scenes of those old days.
Near Winchester, Kentucky, driving out the Lexington turnpike you pass an old brick farmhouse of ante-bellum days; flanked on the one side by an old stone springhouse under two spreading elms and on the other by a large tobacco barn that looks extremely modern and out of place. Behind the house is an orchard of ancient apple and pear trees, all dead at the top, a negro cabin beside which are two black heart cherry trees, higher than the farmhouse and more than three feet through; and yet farther back, hemp and tobacco fields and a woodland pasture of oak and walnut trees. At least this was a description of my home thirty years ago.
I had just graduated from Center College, and having in mind to practice law in Lexington, had during the summer formed the habit of going down to the springhouse and under the shade of its eaves and the overhanging elms, sit and read Kent's Commentaries.
A negro family lived in the cabin, Mose Hunter, his wife and boy. Mose was as black as they grow them in Kentucky; but his wife was the color of my old volumes of Kent and had build and features which fixed the country of her ancestry in northern Africa and seemed to identify her as a desert Berber. Mose worked on the farm, his wife was cook at the farmhouse, and the boy, who was said to be half imbecile, was as harmless and shy as a ground robin. I do not know of his ever having gone off the place. He was probably fourteen, had never been to school, and wandered about like a lost turkey hen. We could depend upon him to pick up the apples, feed the cider mill, water the stock, gather the eggs and feed the pigs and chickens.
The boy had the habit of coming to the springhouse and taking a nap each day on the milk crock bench, which had been discarded since we had bought our new refrigerator. Every warm summer afternoon about three o'clock, he would run down the path, dodge behind a tree out of sight, if his mother happened to step out of the kitchen door, and slipping into the springhouse, lie down and sleep quietly in its cool moist shade for a quarter of an hour; then, still asleep, sit up and in a startled way, talk earnestly for some time, his features transformed by a look of tragic intelligence, which they did not possess at other times. Then he would lie down again and after a few minutes quiet sleep, awake and return to the cabin.
His speech did not disturb me; his voice was low, though tense, and his words unintelligible. Gradually his murmurings became a familiar sound, as the call of the lark from the pasture gatepost.
Finally I noticed that he spoke in an apparently strange tongue and even mentioned time and again names given in my ancient atlas. Many times he used the words, pehu, Kami, Theni, horshesu, hik, nut, tash, hesoph, and un.
I wrote Professor Fales of Danville about this time, sending him a small box of crinoids, and casually mentioned the boy and his strange habit, writing out the above list of words, with others, that he habitually repeated.
He wrote back that the words were Egyptian or a kindred Hamite tongue. Consulting the college library, he had discovered that the ancient Egyptian name for Atlantis was Kami. That Theni was the name of a very ancient prehistoric city, its location unknown. That pehu meant an overflowed land; un, uncultivated land; and the word tash, tribe; the others he was unable to translate.