And Deacon Henzy had gathered up them stuns and set ’em in a settin’ of personal obstinacy and bigotry, and wore ’em for a breastplate. And hard it wuz to hit any soft place under them rocky layers of prejudices inherited and acquired. And he and his folks before him didn’t know what the word mejum wuz, not by personal experience. It needed only a word to set him off. Josiah spoke that word, and the wheel begun to turn and grind out denunciations of the Southerners as a class and as a people. Oh, how he rolled out big-soundin’ terms of scathin’ reproaches and burnin’ rebukes, and the horrible wickedness of one human bein’ enslavin’ another one and enrichin’ himself on the unpaid labor of a brother man! Why, it wuz fairly skairful to hear him go on, fur skairfuller than Josiah’s talk. He had always talked rampant on the subject I knew, but as rampant as he had always been he wuz now fur rampanter than I had ever known him to be. But as I found out most imegiatly, he wuz agitated and excited on this occasion almost more than he could bear, when he first come in. For he soon went on and told us all about it. A boy he had took—Zekiel Place by name—had run away and left him; or, that is, he had made all his preparations to go when the Deacon found it out, and the boy give him the chance of lettin’ him go or keepin’ him and payin’ him wages for his work. Now, Deacon Henzy, like so many other human creeters, wuz so intent on findin’ out and stunin’ other folks’es faults, that he didn’t have time to set down and find out about his own sins and stun himself, so to speak. He never had thought, so I spoze, what a hard master he wuz, and how he had treated Zekiel Place. But I knew it; and all the while he went on a talkin’ about “the ignorance and wastefulness and shiftlessness of this class of boys, and how impossible it wuz to manage ’em and keep ’em down in their places; how you had to set down on ’em and set heavy if you didn’t want to be bairded to your face and run over by ’em; how if you give ’em an inch they would take a ell, and destroy and waste more than their necks wuz worth,” etc., etc., etc.— All the while he wuz a goin’ on and a sayin’ all this I kep’ up a thinkin’, for I knew that Zekiel was a middlin’ good boy, and had been misused by the Deacon, so I had hearn—had been worked beyend his strength, and whipped, and didn’t get enough to eat, so the boy said. The Deacon had took him for his board and clothes; but his board wuz hard indeed, and very knotty, and his clothes wuz very light, very. And so, bein’, as I spoze, sort o’ drove to it, he riz. And as I say, the Deacon was madder than any hen I ever see, wet or dry.