This old soldier, in his seventieth year, had done the most courageous act of his life. Out of pure charity he had married Madame Ponsard, five years his elder, an anti-Bonapartist, and who had been left a widow, destitute, and with six young parentless grandchildren. Fifty years back he had danced with her when she was a belle in Paris, and that fact was an offset for all her senile vanity and querulousness. It reconciled him, not only to receiving the lady herself, large, obese, and rubicund, and, worst of all, anti-Bonapartist, but to take her encumbrances, four girls and two boys, all with fearful appetites and sound lungs. But the old Captain was a sentimentalist; and the young life about him had rejuvenated his own. After all, there was a selfish calculation in his lovely charities; for he knew that to give was to receive in larger measure. I accepted his offer of a shelter. The next morning he brought me a copy of the Delta. It contained this paragraph: “We regret to learn that Mr. Julian Talbot, formerly an actor, and well known in theatrical circles, was yesterday arrested in the atrocious act of abducting a female slave of great personal beauty, belonging to the Hon. Carberry Ratcliff. The slave was recovered, but Talbot managed to escape. The officers are on his track. It is time an example was made of these sneaking Abolitionists.” ---------- “O insupportable, O heavy hour!” I tried to reconcile myself to delay. I stayed a whole fortnight with Leroux. At last I procured the dress of a laboring Celt, and tied up in a bundle a cheap dress that would serve for a boy. I then stuck a pipe through my hat-band, and put a shillelah under my arm. A mop-like red wig concealed a portion of my face. Lamp-black and ochre did the rest. Leroux told me I was premature in my movements, but, without heeding his expostulations, I took an affectionate leave of him and of Madame, whose heart I had won by talking French with her, and listening to her long stories of the ancient _régime_. I went on board a Red River boat. One of the policemen who arrested me was present on the watch; but I stared him stupidly in the face, and passed on unsuspected. Ratcliff was having a canal dug at Lorain for increasing the facilities of transporting cotton; and as the work was unhealthy, he engaged Irishmen for it. The killing an Irishman was no loss, but the death of a slave would be a thousand dollars out of the master’s pocket. I easily got a situation among the diggers. How my heart bounded when I first saw Ratcliff! He came in company with his superintendent, Van Buskirk, and stood near me some minutes while I handled the spade.