"I had to see him about a matter of business which had been intrusted to me. I went there the day I left you. If I had known how it was with him, I should have tried to find a deputy. It is an awful sight, a man who never had compassion needing it, a man who never felt sympathy claiming and repelling it in one. "When I entered the room, where he was sitting alone, he looked up at me with a glare like a tiger-cat's. He was tamed for the moment by the mention of my errand, which was simply to make him a payment. He counted the money carefully, locked it up, and gave me a receipt. Then he began to talk to me, or rather to himself before me. I could acquiesce in all he said. I knew what Giles Rasey was, and understood that the loss of such a son, to such a father, was irreparable. "'Another self! another self!' he repeated, until I hardly knew whether to pity him more for having had a son so like himself, or for having him no longer. It was an injustice that he felt himself suffering,--a bitter injustice. He had counted on this son as his successor, and the miscalculation was one with which he was not chargeable. 'Not thirty-five! I am past sixty, and a young man yet! My father lived to be ninety!' "His rage against this wrong which had been done him was aggravated by another which he had done himself, a weakness into which he had been led by his son,--the only one, probably, in which they had ever been partners. The son had a slave whose ability made him valuable, whose probity made him invaluable. "'I gave him to Giles myself,' said the old man. 'He was such as you don't find one of in a thousand; no, not in ten thousand. I could have had any money for him, if money could have bought him. It couldn't. I gave him to Giles.' "Giles, on the death-bed where he found himself with very little warning, exacted of his father a promise that this man should be made free. "'What could I refuse him then?' asked old Rasey. "The man in whose behalf the promise was made, and who was present when it was made, took it in earnest. "'A fellow whom we had trusted!' cried the old man. 'A fellow in whose attachment we had believed! We have let him carry away and pay large sums of money for us; have even let him go into Free States to pay them, and he always came back faithfully! You may know these people a life long and not learn them out! A fellow whom we had trusted!' "The fellow bade good-day as soon as the funeral services were over. His master was sufficiently himself to surmise his purpose and to make an attempt to baffle it. But the intended freedman was too agile for him; he disappeared without even claiming his manumission-papers. Imagine Rasey's outraged feelings! It was like the Prince of Hell in the old legend, complaining of the uncivil alacrity with which Lazarus obeyed the summons to the upper air:--'He was not to be held, but, giving himself a shake, with every sign of malice, immediately he went away.'"