above, and beyond his two tormentors.

"I sees what!" he chuckled, after a while. "You gen'lemen is tryin' to
have fun with the po' old nigger. But you can't fool old Jake. I knowed
you, Marse Blandford, the minute I sot eyes on you. You was a po' skimpy
little boy no mo' than about fo'teen when you lef' home to come No'th;
but I knowed you the minute I sot eyes on you. You is the mawtal image
of old marster. The other gen'leman resembles you mightily, suh; but you
can't fool old Jake on a member of the old Vi'ginia family. No suh."

At exactly the same time both Carterets smiled and extended a hand for
the watch.

Uncle Jake's wrinkled, black face lost the expression of amusement to
which he had vainly twisted it. He knew that he was being teased, and
that it made little real difference, as far as its safety went, into
which of those outstretched hands he placed the family treasure. But it
seemed to him that not only his own pride and loyalty but much of the
Virginia Carterets' was at stake. He had heard down South during the war
about that other branch of the family that lived in the North and fought
on "the yuther side," and it had always grieved him. He had followed
his "old marster's" fortunes from stately luxury through war to almost
poverty. And now, with the last relic and reminder of him, blessed by
"old missus," and intrusted implicitly to his care, he had come ten
thousand miles (as it seemed) to deliver it into the hands of the one
who was to wear it and wind it and cherish it and listen to it tick off
the unsullied hours that marked the lives of the Carterets--of Virginia.

His experience and conception of the Yankees had been an impression of
tyrants--"low-down, common trash"--in blue, laying waste with fire and