attend!"

"Cato," said another voice from the background, "go to your pantry and assist Bridget with her tea-things," and Miss Herkimer stepped out on the verandah from a window not far off. Miss Herkimer was a good many years older than her sister, but she admitted the fact that she was elderly, and did not seem to find it interfere with her comfort. Her hair was white, and hung in curls over her temples, and the folds of her black silk gown had a free and contented swing which refreshed the eye after the pinched exactness of Miss Judith's costume.

"Gerald and his friend have moved into the smoking-room with their cigars, and as the windows are open I was afraid your instructions might be overheard; and then, Judith, there would be a commotion which you would regret."

"We must think what is right, Susan, do it, and never mind the consequences."

"It cannot be right to interfere between our brother Gerald and his servant. If the customs in his country are different from ours, that cannot be helped. He follows his own, and while he is our guest, it is not for us to disturb."

"Think of the iniquity of slavery, Susan--that that young man should be held in bondage, in this free Canada! It seems awful. Look at him, and deny if you can that he is a man and a brother!"

"I have no objection whatever to admit his being a man and brother, but I certainly should not like to have to call him nephew! And that is what it may come to if you provoke Gerald. You know how violent he can be when he is roused, and if he thought we were tampering with his negro, or attempting an abolitionist scheme, he is capable even of--adopting him, we will call it--and leaving him his whole fortune."

"Do you think so? That would be most unprincipled conduct on his part."

"I know he is quite capable of it; and besides, Judith, I think you are unnecessarily scrupulous about that ugly word 'slavery.' It really seems not so bad a thing after all, come to see it in action. Gerald, now, is extremely kind to the boy--spoils him, indeed, with indulgence, and makes him do very little work. How much better he is off than Stephen's foot-boy, with a pony to mind and the garden to weed when he is not splitting wood or acting butler in the house. It is Stephen's boy who is the slave, to my thinking. Again, I heard Gerald say he refused two thousand dollars for him from a barber in New Orleans. He is quite a valuable boy, and you would tempt him to leave his master!"

"Two thousand dollars for a black boy? Why! Stephen's white boy gets only ten dollars a month and some clothes. Does it not seem extravagant, now, to have so much money tied up in one negro?--and sinful? How much good might be done with that money if the boy were realized! One like Stephen's at ten dollars a month could do his work--it seems to be only shaving his master, and after that to do what he is bid--and the rest of the money might do such very great good. Five hundred dollars might be given to African missions to enlighten his pagan fellow-countrymen, and would carry the truth to so many!--and still there would be money over to do much good."

"And how do you propose to realize a negro boy, sister, except by selling him to another slave owner? And what about the man and brother?"

"True, Susan! Quite true. I admit the force of your objection. It is another illustration of the mystery our good rector dwelt upon so touchingly last Sunday, that good and evil walk the earth hand-in-hand. A solemn thought! But in this case it really seems to me that the boy's bondage would be well compensated. He is a slave already, you must remember--has no idea what liberty means--and five hundred dollars would bring so many darkened savages within the influence of gospel light. If the poor ignorant creature knew enough to understand, I am sure he would rejoice to think that so slight a change in his own circumstances would bring so vast a benefit to his benighted brethren."

"And you'd still be fifteen hundred dollars to the good, Judith. Quite an operation in another man's niggers! Ha, ha! Godliness is profitable! That's sound evangelical doctrine! Ha, ha, ha!"

These words rang forth in a discordant voice from a neighbouring window, the Venetians of which were now pushed open.

The ladies gasped and turned round in dismay. As they had grown earnest in their conversation their voices had been rising to the pitch at which they could not but be heard without eaves-dropping, and they had been overheard.

Within the window, which was open, stood the "Gerald" of whom they had been discoursing--a tall square-framed man, but sadly wasted and collapsed under prolonged attacks of malarial fever. He was between fifty and sixty years of age, with features which had once been stern and resolute, but now, under the stress of continued ill-health, had grown querulous and peevish in their expression. He had gone to Louisiana some thirty years before to push his fortune. From French-speaking Lower Canada to French-understanding Louisiana seemed less of an expatriation than to English New York or California, and such Frenchness as he was able to bring--he was English-born after all, and only Canadian by education--had prepossessed the Louisianians in his favour. He had pushed his fortune--married the heiress of a valuable plantation near Natchez, where he had resided ever since--and amassed wealth. He had lost, however, his wife, his child, and latterly his good-health; and at last had been compelled to return to his friends in the North to give his shattered constitution a last chance to shake off the creeping agues which were dragging him to the grave. He had been a year already under his sisters' roof, greatly to his own worriment; for between his fever fits and the prostration which followed them, there would intervene hours of restless irritability, when it seemed to him that his affairs were entangling themselves into a knot of hopeless confusion, deprived as they were of the master's eye which alone sees clearly.

"What do you think of that, major?" Gerald continued, turning to his companion who was gnawing the end of a very large cigar--a tall sallow man with a much waxed and pointed black moustache and goatee, and an exuberant display of jewellery in his shirt front. "Who in Natchez would expect to find me summering in a nest of blazing abolitionists? Better say nothing when you get home, or I may have to settle with the vigilance committee when I go back."

"I did not expect it, colonel," said the major, pulling down his waistcoat and looking dignified. "Among fanatical Yankees I reckon on hearing the institootions of my country vilified, and so I give sech cattle a wide berth; but here, on British terri-tory, I expected some liberality. Bless my soul! trying to corrupt your servant under your very nose!"

The ladies had withdrawn in confusion under their brother's first attack, or civility to his hostesses must have kept the major silent. At the same time he felt outraged. To think that he, one of the most "high-toned" men of his neighbourhood, and with the very soundest Southern principles, should have been trapped into a den of lowlived--it was always "lowlived"--abolitionism! His friend Herkimer too, had always passed for a "high-toned gentleman" of sound principles when in Natchez, and to find him the member of such a family was inexpressibly shocking.

"Yes," said Herkimer, "it is bad--shows what fools women can be when they don't know, and swallow all the rant that gets into print. After that they think they know so much that they won't believe a word those who could tell them can say. If my boy, Cato, now, had not been an extra good nigger, these sisters of mine would have made him leave me long ago. When his