No ray of light had pierced the darkened mind of Crazy Joe. All these long, weary years he had been waiting, waiting, waiting, for his father Jacob to come down into Egypt, but he came not. He still talked as if it was but yesterday that he had been cast into the pit by his brethren, and then taken out and sold into Egypt. He spent his time in turns at the planter's and Uncle Dan's cabin. He was well known throughout the neighborhood, and pitied and kindly treated by all. His strange hallucination, although causing pain and perplexity to his shattered mind, worked no change in his gentle disposition; his sad eyes never flashed with anger; no emotion varied the melancholy monotone of his voice. When at the home of the planter, Joe divided his time between the stables, the garden and the library. He would have been a constant reader of the Bible, Josephus, Socrates, Milton's "Paradise Lost," had it not been discovered by Mrs. Tompkins that these books only tended to increase the darkness in which his mind was shrouded, and she had them kept from him. At Uncle Dan's mountain home he passed his time in hunting and trapping, becoming expert in both. Sixteen years had wrought a great change in Uncle Dan, bowing his tall and sinewy form. His face, which he had always kept smooth shaven, had grown sharper and thinner, and his long hair hanging about his shoulders, had turned from black to gray; yet his eye was as true and his hand as steady as when, in his youthful days, he carried away the prize at the shooting match. His visits to the plantation became more frequent and his stays longer, for the old man grew lonesome in his hut, and he was ever a welcome guest at the Tompkins mansion. Sixteen years had made a wonderful transformation in the politics of the country. The Whig party had been swallowed up by the Republican or Abolition organization. The seeds of freedom, sown by Clarkson, Brown and others, had taken root, and, in the Fall of 1860, bade fare to ripen into a bounteous harvest. The Southern feeling against the North had grown more and more bitter, and the low, rumbling thunders of a mighty storm might have been heard--a storm not far distant, and whose fury naught but the blood of countless thousands could assuage. "In the beginning, God created Heaven and the earth, and all that was in them, in six days, and rested on the seventh." The speaker was Crazy Joe, the time, midsummer of 1860, the place the banks of a creek at the foot of the mountains, not more than two or three hundred feet from Uncle Dan's cabin. "Then the book says God made man out of clay. Josephus says he called the first man Adam, because Adam means red, and He made him out of red clay. Now, if man could once be made out of clay, why not now? Maybe God will let me make a man, too."