'You come from England, sa?' he asked, looking up from the hearth and temporarily desisting in his vigorous puffing at the fire he had already kindled for me to dress by.
'Yes,' I answered.
'Dat a long ways off, sa?'
'Over three thousand miles of salt water, Pompey.'
'Golly! I 'fraid o' dem! didn't tink dere was so much water in de world!' adding a compliment on the supposed courage involved in crossing the Atlantic. Negroes have almost no relative ideas of distance or number beyond a very limited extent; they will say 'a tousan'd,' fifty or a hundred 'tousand,' with equal inexactitude and fluency. Presently Pompey began again:
'Many colored people in England, sa?'
'Very few. You might live there a year without meeting one.'
'I'se hear dey's all free—dem what is dar? dat so?' he asked, curiously.
'Yes; just as they are at the North; only I think they're a little better treated in England. We don't make any difference between men on account of their skin. You might marry a white woman there, Pompey, if you could get her to have you.'
Pompey honored this remark with as much ready negro laughter as he seemed to think it demanded.