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“After the orchard was ploughed Aleck didn’t do a thing but look after me. We fished together and went swimming together; and we hunted eggs and trapped rabbits; and when I got older and had a gun Aleck would go along to look after the dogs and cut down the trees when we were out for coons.

“Once I tumbled into a catfish-hole by the dam, and he fished me out; and once, while he had crawled in after a woodchuck, a rock slipped and pinned him down, and I ran two miles to get help, and fell in a faint before I could tell them where he was. What Aleck had in those days I had, and what I had he had; and there was no difference between us till the war broke out.

“I was grown then, and Aleck was six or seven years older. We were on the border-line, and one morning the Union soldiers opened fire, and all that was left of the house, barns, outbuildings, and negro quarters was a heap of ashes.

“That sent me South, of course, feeling pretty ugly and bitter, and I don’t know that I’ve gotten over it since. My father was too old to go, and he and my mother moved into the village and lived in two rooms over my father’s office. The negroes, of course, had to shift for themselves, and hard shifting it was–the women and children herding in the towns and the men working as teamsters and doing what they could.

“The night before I left home Aleck crawled out to see me. I was hidden in a hayrick in the lower pasture. He begged me to let him go with me, but I knew father would want him, and he finally gave in and promised to stay with him, and I left. But no one was his own master in those days, and in a few months they had drafted Aleck and carried him off.

“Three years after that my mother fell ill, and I heard of it and came back in disguise, and was arrested as a suspicious character as I entered the town. I didn’t blame them, for I looked like a tramp and intended to. The next day I was let out and went home to where my mother and father were living. As I was opening the garden-gate–it was night–Aleck laid his hand on my shoulder. He had on the uniform of a United States soldier. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first. I had lost track of him, and, as I found out afterward, so had my father. We stood under the street-lamp and he saw the look in my face and threw his hands up over his head as a negro does when some sudden shock comes to him.

“‘Don’t turn away f’om me, Sammy,’ he cried; ‘please don’t, Sammy. ‘Tain’t my fault I got on dese clo’es, ‘deed it ain’t. Dey done fo’ced me. I heared you was here an’ I been tryin’ to git to ye all day. Oh, I so glad to git hold ob ye, Sammy, so glad, so glad.’ He broke out into sobs of crying. I was near it myself, for he was the first one from home I had seen, and there was something in his voice that went through me.

“Then he unbuttoned his coat, felt in his pocket, pushed something into my hand, and disappeared in the darkness. When I got inside and held it out to the light, he had given me two five-dollar greenbacks!

“I was sitting by my mother the next night about ten o’clock–she wouldn’t let me out of her sight–when there came a rap at the door and Aleck came in. I knew how my father would feel about seeing him in those clothes. I didn’t know till afterward that they were all he had and that the poor fellow was as bad off as any of us.