The exigencies of his ministerial life had so far made it necessary for him to leave the plantation but twice. Father Prout had managed to have his "stations" rotate from one small town to another in the immediate vicinity, and, with his growing stoutness, Mr. Davenport had taken to driving, chiefly, since Selim had been retired from active service, to and from his places of meeting week after week. Twice, for a year each time, he had been compelled to leave the plantation in charge of Jerry and remove to a more distant town, where the small house and unaccustomed conditions had resulted in ill health for Katherine and the children. But now they were on the "place" again and were owners of much that required that they face larger and more complicated responsibilities--and what was to be done? Griffith had made up his mind, definitely, that he did not want his sons to grow up in a slave-owning atmosphere. He had read and thought much of the struggle over the Missouri Compromise Bill. He had hoped great things from it, and had beheld its final repeal with dismay. He had seen, so he believed, in it the arm that was destined to check if not to wipe out human slavery. How this was to be done he did not know; but that he hoped for it, for all men, he knew. For himself he was quite sure that as a preacher, if not as a man, it was wrong. He had determined to so educate his sons that they would not blame him for shutting them out from at least the inherited possibilities of the institution which had fallen upon him. But now, what could be done? The Major's will had thrown the task definitely upon him and had greatly increased the difficulties. He knew that it was against the laws of his state to free the negroes and leave them within its borders. Exactly what the terms of the law were, he did not know; but it was easy to realize its need and force. Free negroes were at once a menace to all parties concerned, both white and black. They had no work, no homes, no ties of restraint and responsibility. They were amenable to no one and no one was their friend. They could starve, or they could steal, or they could go North. If they did the first--in a land of plenty--they were not made of that stuff out of which human nature is fashioned, be that nature encased in a white or in a black skin. If they did the second they fared far worse than slaves--the chain-gang for home and the law for a driver has horrors worse than even slavery--at least so thought the colored man of 1852. But if they attempted to achieve the last of the three alternatives their lot was hardest of all. They must leave home, family, wife, children, parents and friends--all that made life endurable to a patient, affectionate, simple nature--and find what? Neither friends, welcome nor work! A climate in which they suffered, a people amongst whom their rarity and the strangeness of their speech and color made of them objects of curiosity and aversion--where the very children fled