down at last, as much like his substance when she know'd him, as your shadow when it's drawn out to its very finest and longest by the sun, is like you. But it was his remains, there's no doubt about that. She took on with joy, poor thing, as much as if it had been all of him!"
"Had he bought land?" asked Mr. Bevan.
"Ah! He'd bought land," said Mark, shaking his head, "and paid for it too. Every sort of nateral advantage was connected "with it, the agents said; and there certainly was one, quite unlimited. No end to the water!"
"It's a thing he couldn't have done without, I suppose," observed Martin, peevishly.
"Certainly not, sir. There it was, any way; always turned on, and no water-rate. Independent of three or four slimy old rivers close by, it varied on the farm from four to six foot deep in the dry season. He couldn't say how deep it was in the rainy time, for he never had anything long enough to sound it with."
"Is this true?" asked Martin of his companion.
"Extremely probable," he answered. "Some Mississippi or Missouri lot, I dare say."
"However," pursued Mark, "he came from I-don't-know-where-and-all, down to New York here to meet his wife and children; and they started off again in a steamboat this blessed afternoon, as happy to be along with each other, as if they was going to Heaven. I should think they was, pretty straight, if I may judge from the poor man's looks."
"And may I ask," said Martin, glancing, but not with any displeasure, from Mark to the negro, "who this gentleman is? Another friend of yours?"
"Why, sir," returned Mark, taking him aside, and speaking confidentially in his ear, "he's a man of color, sir."
"Do you take me for a blind man," asked Martin, somewhat impatiently, "that you think it necessary to tell me that, when his face is the blackest that ever was seen?"
"No, no; when I say a man of color," returned Mark, "I mean that he's been one of them as there's picters of in the shops. A man and a brother, you know, sir," said Mr. Tapley, favoring his master with a significant indication of the figure so often represented in tracts and cheap prints.
"A slave!" cried Martin, in a whisper.
"Ah!" said Mark in the same tone. "Nothing else. A slave. Why, when that there man was young—don't look at him, while I'm a telling it—he was shot in the leg, gashed in the arm; scored in his live limbs, like pork; beaten out of shape; had his neck galled with an iron collar, and wore iron rings upon his wrists and ancles. The marks are on him to this day. When I was having my dinner just now, he stripped off his coat, and took away my appetite."
"Is this true?" asked Martin of his friend, who stood beside them.
"I have no reason to doubt it," he answered, looking down, and shaking his head. "It very often is."
