As I went on to the westward, I began to see Blue Mound rising like a
low mountain off my starboard bow, and I stopped at a farm in the
foot-hills of the Mound where, because it was rainy, I paid four
shillings for putting my horses in the stable. There were two other
movers stopping at the same place. They had a light wagon and a yoke of
good young steers, and had been out of Madison two days longer than I
had been. I noticed that they left their wagon in a clump of bushes, and
that while one of them--a man of fifty or more, slept in the house, the
other, a young fellow of twenty or twenty-two, lay in the wagon, and
that one or the other seemed always to be on guard near the vehicle. The
older man had a long beard and a hooked nose, and seemed to be a still
sort of person, until some one spoke of slavery; then he broke out in a
fierce speech denouncing slaveholders, and the slavocracy that had the
nation in its grip.

"You talk," said the farmer, "like a black Abolitionist."

"I'm so black an Abolitionist," said he, "that I'd be willing to
shoulder a gun any minute if I thought I could wipe out the curse
of slavery."

The farmer was terribly scandalized at this, and when the old man walked
away to his wagon, he said to the young man and me that that sort of
talk would make trouble and ruin the nation; and that he didn't want
any more of it around his place.

"Well," said the traveler, "you won't have any more of it from us. We're
just pulling out." After the farmer went away, he spoke to me about it.