money was slow and circuitous; but those were not fast days. The fish were to be caught, and cleaned, and salted, and spread on the flake, and turned day after day till thoroughly dry. Then they were packed, and sent in vessels to Maryland or Virginia, to be exchanged for flour or tobacco; then the flour and tobacco were sold in foreign ports, and silks, muslins, and other articles of luxury procured with the money.
The Widow Lawton was a notable, stirring woman, and it was generally agreed that no one in that region kept a sharper look-out for the main chance. Nobody sent better fish to market; nobody had such good luck in hiving bees; nobody could spin more knots of yarn in a day, or weave such handsome table-cloths. Great was her store of goodies for the winter. The smoke-house was filled with hams, and the ceiling of the kitchen was festooned with dried apples and pumpkins. In summer, there was a fly-cage suspended from the centre. It was made of bristles, in a sort of basket-work, in which were arranged bits of red, yellow, and green woollen cloth tipped with honey. Flies, deceived by the fair appearance, sipped the honey, and remained glued to the woollen; their black bodies serving to set off the bright colors to advantage. In those days, such a cage was considered a very genteel ornament for a New England kitchen. Rich men sometimes have their coats of arms sketched on the floor in colored crayons, to be effaced in one night by the feet of dancers. The Widow Lawton ornamented her kitchen floor in a manner as ephemeral, though less expensive. Every afternoon it was strewn with white sand from the beach, and marked all over with the broom in a herring-bone pattern; a very suitable coat of arms for the owner of a fish-flake. In the parlor was an ingrained carpet, the admiration and envy of the neighborhood. A large glass was surmounted by a gilded eagle upholding a chain,—prophetic of the principal employment of the bird of freedom for three quarters of a century thereafter. In the Franklin fireplace, tall brass andirons, brightly burnished, gleamed through a feathery forest of asparagus, interspersed with scarlet berries. The high, mahogany case of drawers, grown black with time, and lustrous with much waxing, had innumerable great drawers and little drawers, all resplendent with brass ornaments, kept as bright as new gold.
The Widow was accustomed to say, "It takes a good deal of elbow-grease to keep everything trig and shiny"; and though she was by no means sparing of her own, the neat and thriving condition of the household and the premises was largely owing to the black Chloe, her slave and servant-of-all-work. When Chloe was a babe strapped on her mother's shoulders, they were stolen from Africa and packed in a ship. What became of her mother she knew not. How the Widow Lawton obtained the right to make her work from morning till night, without wages, she never inquired. It had always been so, ever since she could remember, and she had heard the minister say, again and again, that it was an ordination of Providence. She did not know what ordination was, or who Providence was; but she had a vague idea that both were up in the sky, and that she had nothing to do but submit to them. So year after year she patiently cooked meals, and weeded the garden, and cut and dried the apples, and scoured the brasses, and sanded the floor in herring-bone pattern, and tended the fish-flake till the profitable crop of the sea was ready for market. There was a melancholy expression in the eyes of poor, ignorant Chloe, which seemed to indicate that there might be in her soul a fountain that was deep, though it was sealed by the heavy stone of slavery. Carlyle said of a dog that howled at the moon, "He would have been a poet, if he could have found a publisher." And Chloe, though she never thought about the Infinite, was sometimes impressed with a feeling of its mysterious presence, as she walked back and forth tending the fish-flake; with the sad song of the sea forever resounding in her ears, and a glittering
