But hark! Old Scipio is fast asleep and snoring like Falstaff behind the arras. Now that old negro is as assuredly dreaming of witches, or wrecks, or pirates, or ghosts, that have been seen flitting about the burying-grounds and country church-yards at midnight, as he sits there. He is somewhere between eighty and one hundred, he does not exactly know which; but as your negro keeps no family record, it is safe to allow a lee-way of some ten years in the calculation of his nativity. Of his genealogy though, he is quite sure, for he proves beyond a doubt, that he is the son of Job, who was the son of Pomp, who was the son of Caleb, who was the son of Cæsar, who was the son of Cudjoe, who was caught in Africa. His whole life has been passed in and about the shores of Long Island Sound, and he is not only a veritable chronicle of the military adventures that have been enacted upon its borders in the American wars, but his head is a complete storehouse, stuffed to overflowing with all sorts of legendary lore, of wrecks, of pirates, of murders and fights, and deeds unholy—of massacres, bombardments and burnings, all jumbled up in such inexplicable confusion, history and legend, truth and fiction, that it is almost impossible to divide the one from the other. Sometimes in the cold winter nights, when the storm is howling, as it does now, I put him upon the track, and upon my word, the influence of his gossip told in drowsy under tone is such, that I find it a matter of serious question, whether the most monstrous things in the way of the supernatural, are by any means matter of wonderment; and fully concede, that men may have been seen walking about with their heads under their arms, vanishing in smoke upon being addressed—that old fishermen have sculled about the creeks and bays in their coffins, after they were dead and buried—that gibbets are of necessity surrounded by ghosts, and that prophecies and predictions, and witchcraft are, and must be true as holy writ. Indeed, with all the sad realities of life about me, I find it refreshing to have my soul let loose occasionally, to wander forth, to frolic and gambol, and stare, without any conventional rule, or let, or hindrance to restrain it. In how many adventures has that good old negro, quietly sleeping in the corner, been my guide and pilot. In our shooting, and fishing and sailing excursions, the shores of the Sound became as familiar to us as our own firesides, and the dark black rocks, with their round and kelp covered sides as the faces of old friends and acquaintance.