“Oh yes,” said Foster, with the first laugh he had indulged in during the interview, “a Radical is a man who wants to have everything his own way; to have all the property in the world equally divided among everybody; who wants all the power to be equally shared, and, in short, who wants everything turned upside down!”
“Hush! don’t laugh so loud!” said Hester, looking anxiously round, and holding up one of her pretty little fingers, “some one may hear you and find us! Strange,” she added pensively, “surely you must be under some mistake, for I heard my dear father try to explain it once to a friend, who seemed to me unwilling to understand. I remember so well the quiet motion of his large, firm but sweet mouth as he spoke, and the look of his great, earnest eyes—‘A Radical,’ he said, ‘is one who wishes and tries to go to the root of every matter, and put all wrong things right without delay.’”
What George Foster might have said to this definition of a Radical, coming, as it did, from such innocent lips, we cannot say, for the abrupt closing of a door at the other end of the garden caused Hester to jump up and run swiftly out of the bower. Foster followed her example, and, returning to the scene of his labours, threw off his coat and began to dig with an amount of zeal worthy of his friend the incorrigible “hyperkrite” himself.
A few minutes later and Ben-Ahmed approached, in close conversation with Peter the Great.
“Hallo!” exclaimed the latter, in stern tones, as they came up, “what you bin about, sar? what you bin doin’? Not’ing done since I was here more an hour past—eh, sar?”
The midshipman explained, with a somewhat guilty look and blush, that he had been resting in the bower, and that he had stayed much longer than he had intended.
“You just hab, you rascal! But I cure you ob dat,” said the negro, catching up a piece of cane that was lying on the ground, with which he was about to administer condign chastisement to the idle slave, when his master stopped him.
“Hurt him not,” he said, raising his hand; “is not this his first offence?”
“Yes, massa, de bery fust.”
“Well, tell him that the rod shall be applied next time he is found idling. Enough, follow me!”