some two tree names, but I allus thought dat wuz 'coz dey hedn't
nuffin' else ter call dere can. Must be a free feller needs mo'
name, somehow. Ef I keep on I reckon I'll git enuff atter a while.
H'yer it's gwine on two year only sence de s'rrender, an' I'se got
tree ob 'em sartain!"

The speaker was a colored man, standing before his log-house in
the evening of a day in June. His wife was the only listener to
the monologue. He had been examining a paper which was sealed and
stamped with official formality, and which had started him upon
the train of thought he had pursued. The question he was trying in
vain to answer was only the simplest and easiest of the thousand
strange queries which freedom had so recently propounded to him
and his race.



CHAPTER II.

THE FONT.


Knapp-of-reeds was the name of a plantation which was one of the
numerous possessions of P. Desmit, Colonel and Esquire, of the
county of Horsford, in the northernmost of those States which good
Queen Caroline was fortunate enough to have designated as memorials
of her existence. The plantation was just upon that wavy line which
separates the cotton region of the east from the tobacco belt that
sweeps down the pleasant ranges of the Piedmont region, east of
the Blue Appalachians. Or, to speak more correctly, the plantation