UP STREAM: ON THE EED RIVEK. 387 



the skin of his forehead twisted into innumerable 

 'small wrinkles, his lips pressed firmly together, his 

 bright reddish-grey eyes apparently fixed, but, in 

 reality, perpetually shifting their restless glances from 

 the men by whom he was surrounded, to some chests 

 that lay upon the deck before him, and again from 

 the chests to the men ; his whole lean, bony, angular 

 figure in a position that made it difficult to conjecture 

 whether he was going to pray, or to sing, or to preach 

 a sermon. In one hand he held a roll of pigtail 

 tobacco, in the other some bright -coloured ribbons, 

 which he had taken from an open chest containing 

 the manifold articles constituting the usual stock-in- 

 trade of a pedlar. Beside this chest were two others, 

 and beside those lay a negro, howling frightfully, and 

 rubbing alternately his right shoulder and his left 

 foot ; but nevertheless, according to all appearance, 

 by no means in danger of taking his departure for the 

 other world. As the Yankee pedlar raised his hand 

 and signed to the vociferous blackamoor to be silent, 

 the face of the former gradually assumed that droll, 

 cunning, and yet earnest expression which betrays 

 those double-distilled Hebrews, when they are plan- 

 ning to get possession, in a quasi-legal manner, of the 

 dollars of their fellow-citizens ; in a word, when they 

 are manoeuvring to exchange their worthless northern 

 wares for the sterling coin of the south. Presently 

 his arms began to swing about like those of a tele- 

 graph ; he threw a long and loving glance at the two 



