The next morning I was wakened by the soft voice of Aunty Boone, our
cook, saying:

"You better get up! Revilly blow over at the fort long time ago. Wonder
it didn't blow your batter-cakes clear away. Mat and Beverly been up
since 'fore sunup."

Aunty Boone was the biggest woman I have ever seen. Not the tallest,
maybe--although she measured up to a height of six feet and two
inches--not the fattest, but a woman with the biggest human frame,
overlaid with steel-hard muscles. Yet she was not, in her way, clumsy or
awkward. She walked with a free stride, and her every motion showed a
powerful muscular control. Her face was jet-black, with keen shining
eyes, and glittering white teeth. In my little child-world she was the
strangest creature I had ever known. In the larger world whither the
years of my manhood have led me she holds the same place.

She had been born a princess of royal blood, heir to a queenship in her
tribe in a far-away African kingdom. In her young womanhood, so the tale
ran, the slave-hunter had found her and driven her aboard a slave-ship
bound for the American coast. He never drove another slave toward any
coast. In Virginia her first purchaser had sold her quickly to a Georgia
planter whose _heirs_ sent her on to Mississippi. Thence she soon found
her way to the Louisiana rice-fields. Nobody came to take her back to
any place she had quitted. "Safety first," is not a recent practice. She
had enormous strength and capacity for endurance, she learned rapidly,
kept her own counsel, obeyed no command unless she chose to do so, and
feared nothing in the Lord's universe. The people of her own race had