38 NATHANIEL SOUTHGATE SEALER 



the jabbering and shouting. Now with a leap he would clutch 

 his long walking-staff and charge the crowd in the quarter, 

 laying about him with amazing nimbleness, until all the of- 

 fenders were run to their holes. Back he would come from his 

 excursion and settle himself again to sleep. I could see that his 

 rage was merely on the surface and that he used it for a cor- 

 rective, for he evidently took care not to hurt any one. 



There was one man in the community at the time, of some 

 fortune, who had an evil reputation on account of his cruelty 

 to his slaves. One of them, it was said with horror which evi- 

 dently moved his neighbors greatly, owed his lamed state to his 

 master's rage. With this slaveholder the others had little to 

 do. They evidently regarded him as an outcast and told stories 

 of how he had been a "negro-trader." 



Among the negroes whom I remember there were sundry very 

 old, who lived together in a building in the quarter and were 

 well cared for. They were troublesome, because one of them, 

 named Bristoe, had an ineradicable fancy for harboring low- 

 down whites, who would be found from time to time hidden 

 away in his quarters, where they shared food with the blacks. 

 Among these unhappy dependents was a certain aged drunken 

 vagabond bearing the aristocratic name of Lee Sutherland. He 

 was an ancient Virginian, with a gentleman's face and manner 

 still showing through his debauched misery. He had no known 

 kindred, and many efforts to keep him above utter degradation 

 had failed. In that day there were no retreats where such folk 

 could be stored away. Each time Sutherland turned up under 

 Bristoe's bed there was a hubbub in the household. Bristoe 

 was soundly rated, but he was too old for punishment or for the 

 threat of "selling South" to have any effect on him. He en- 

 joyed the situation, especially the peculiar dignity that came 

 to him from protecting a man of quality. On one occasion 

 when his quarters were watched, he harbored the man in the 

 ice-house, where the wretch, in striving to crawl beneath the 

 straw, had got over near the ice and was found nearly frozen to 



