other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for
covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic
to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in
spite of all Mr. Johnson's theories and her own arrogant generalizations,
to establish their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and silly
people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of question. I have no
doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce--
it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the
baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson's family--have as light skins and as
golden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy painted for them in
our world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which
had ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly
tangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I
would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea
so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin
keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother's eyes in
infancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was
the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more
be taken in proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When she came
to us, it was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her
mother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school
lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in
the evenings, when a heavy day's play and the natural influences of the
hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words
of one syllable.

The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her duties;
but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all
menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait for
callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up the front