Later, under the influence of his name picture, Aunt Lady had thought to make a preacher of the Infant Samuel; but after a brief trial the coloured seminary had returned him with thanks. Their young brother, they reported, was undoubtedly an earnest seeker, even sanctified; he preached with fluency and was powerful in prayer; but though his language and gestures were most superior, neither prayers nor sermons seemed somehow to make sense; they sounded more like poetry. Nor would his fellow theologs take him seriously. Whatever he said or did, they sniggered at; a fatal handicap in the preaching profession. So Dr. Tom took him in hand and decided to make a stable boy of him. Sam’l became at once every inch a horseman; he had great adaptability. True, whenever he entered a stall he got kicked, horses being intuitive creatures, not easily deceived. But Dr. Tom bore with him until one morning he found Sam’l running his aged, cherished buggy mare, Miss Susy, round and round the back lot, riding her neck like a jockey, plying the outraged favourite with whip and spur--“jes’ givin’ the ol’ gal a breath-out,” he explained, “to take the rheumatics out’n her knees.” Incidentally, he gave Miss Susy an attack of heaves from which she never recovered. After that Aunt Lady thought best to take Sam’l into the house under her own eye, where there were less valuable things than horses to learn upon; and that was the period during which we had discovered him, dramatizing himself on the model of Judge Cornish’s stately old factotum, Romulus. He had already, in his zeal, polished most of the silver off Aunt Lady’s tea set, and he averaged one smash a meal; whereas Romulus had never been known in his long career to break so much as a teacup. “Sam’l can’t seem really to _do_ things, somehow,” said Aunt Lady, sighing. “He just does _at_ ’em. Play-acting, like. ‘Monkey motions’; you remember?” It was a game the little darkies used to play when we were all young together, a left-over from the care-free days of slavery and the plantation “street.” A leader, chosen for skill at pantomime, would select something to imitate, and the circle around him must represent the subject as best they could each in his own way, singing as they went: “I ack monkey moshuns, too-ra-loo; I ack monkey moshuns, so I do. I ack ’em good, and dat’s a fack: I ack jes’ like dem monkeys ack.” And so they did--“gemman moshuns,” “lady moshuns,” “preacher moshuns,” and other less polite--absurd little skinny-shanked, mop-headed creatures, with their soft, bright animal eyes and ingratiating ways; the bandar-log indeed. But why should his fellow bandar-log object so consistently to Sam’l’s monkey motions? For the grown-up Negroes were as unkind to him as his schoolmates had been. Was it, I suggested, that they thought him a “white-folks’ nigger”?