"But what is going to be done?" Old Master cried.
Mr. Clem shrugged his shoulders. "Something is going to pop pretty soon and pop like a whip," said he. "A glass house is going to be broken and hoar frost will gather on leaves never intended for the chill air. The whole trouble comes from slavery and I, for one, am bold enough to say that the end is surely not far off."
"I don't want you to say it at my table, sir," Old Master almost fiercely shouted. "I don't want you to talk treason at my board."
Not in the least was Mr. Clem offended, nor was he at all put out by Old Master's violence. "Guilford," said he, "the trouble is that the South has got the negro mixed up with its religion and with its notion of good government. To own a slave no longer stops at the possession of a piece of property, but becomes so much of a sentiment that the man who does not care to own one is looked upon as an outlaw. And if he declares that he would not own one, that his conscience is against it, he is put down as a traitor to the South, seeking to overturn the American government."
Old Miss threw up her head and sniffed the unsavory air. "Clem," she said, "I don't want you to talk that way in the presence of my son. Why, it wouldn't astonish me to hear you say that a negro is as good as a white man!"
'Squire Boyle listened with his fork raised and his mouth half open. He had long been suspected of holding the views of the abolitionists; it was known that he had favored Henry Clay's scheme for gradual emancipation. He had been studiedly discreet, but being by birth a Northern man, suspicion naturally turned an eye upon him. Sometimes when he must have felt that his silence was eating him like an internal cancer, he had come to Old Master to be bold with healthful utterances, but of late, as the country became more deeply stirred, Old Master warned him to swallow rapidly whenever he felt a strong disposition to talk upon the subject of abolition. And now he swallowed with such vigor and rapidity that a stranger to the precaution placed upon his speech must surely have thought that he was choking to death.
"'Squire, did you swallow something the wrong way?" Mr. Clem asked, leaning over toward him.
"No, something wants to come up the right way," the 'squire piped, the red Adam's apple at his thin throat dodging like a wood-pecker. "I want to say something, but I won't. But the time will come when I will stand on a hill—I've got it picked out—and bawl what I think. Guilford, you are fixing to scold me, sir, and I must ask you not to say a word."
Old Master laughed at this, the old 'squire's desperate threat of rebellion, and had taken up a bit of bread to roll his customary bolus, when yellow Sam, who had been sent to town, came in with a letter. Old Miss began at once to speculate as to whom it could be from, and Old Master, winking at Bob and looking at her as he wiped his glasses, said that he supposed he could put the letter under his plate and wonder a long time as to the identity of the writer. "But happily," said he, again winking his mischievous eye, "we are provided with means whereby we can cut through all speculation and get at once into the heart and the truth of the subject. To be brief," he added, "we can open the letter."
"Well, for goodness sake, why don't you?" his wife broke in, as she always did when she saw him indulging a droll humor. "Give it to me."