He smiled again. "Yes, sah; I used to work for him. He's a nice man." He
spoke the truth that time beyond a peradventure. He was healthier here
than in the other place, he thought, and wages were higher; but he liked
the other place better "for pleasure." It was an odd coincidence, was it
not, that I should meet in this solitude a man who knew the only citizen
of Alabama with whom I was ever acquainted.

At another time I fell in with an oldish colored man, who, like myself,
had taken to the woods for a quiet Sunday stroll. _He_ was from
Mississippi, he told me. Oh, yes, he remembered the war; he was a slave,
twenty-one years old, when it broke out. To his mind, the present
generation of "niggers" were a pretty poor lot, for all their
"edication." He had seen them crowding folks off the sidewalk, and
puffing smoke in their faces. All of which was nothing new; I had found
that story more or less common among negroes of his age. He didn't
believe much in "edication;" but when I asked if he thought the blacks
were better off in slavery times, he answered quickly, "I'd rather be a
free man, _I_ had." He wasn't married; he had plenty to do to take care
of himself. We separated, he going one way and I the other; but he
turned to ask, with much seriousness (the reader must remember that this
was only three months after a national election), "Do you think they'll
get free trade?" "Truly," said I to myself, "'the world is too much with
us.' Even in the flat-woods there is no escaping the tariff question."
But I answered, in what was meant to be a reassuring tone, "Not yet
awhile. Some time." "I hope not," he said,--as if liberty to buy and
sell would be a dreadful blow to a man living in a shanty in a Florida
pine barren! He was taking the matter rather too much to heart, perhaps;
but surely it was encouraging to see such a man interested in broad
economical questions, and I realized as never before the truth of what