Sol Cutter paid his master eight dollars a week. As he had to keep himself out of his remainder earnings, he was naturally more enterprising than most slaves, and I took a fancy to him immediately. From the day I found him, he always went out with me on my long rows. The middle of a river six miles wide is the safest place that can be found at the South for insurrectionary conversation. Even there I used to wonder whether the Southerners had not given secret-service money to the alligators who occasionally stuck their knobby noses above the flood to scent our colloquies. Sol was pulling away steadily, having "got his second wind" at the end of the first mile. I was sitting with tiller-ropes in hand, and studying his strong-featured, but utterly expressionless face, with deep curiosity. His face was one over which the hot roller of a great agony has passed, smoothing out all its meaning. "So your master sells you your time?" "Yes, Mossa." (Always "_Mossa_" never "_Massa_," so far South as this.) "Do you support your wife and children as well as yourself?" A convulsive gulp on the part of Sol, but no reply. "Have you never been married?" "Yes, Mossa." "Is your wife dead?" "I hope so,--to de good God, I hope so, Mossa!" Sol leaned forward on his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on me a face stern as Cato's,-- "Nebber, _nebber_, NEBBER, shall I see wife or chil' agin!" I then said openly that I was an Abolitionist,--that I believed in every man's right to freedom,--and that, as to the safest friend in the world, he might tell me his story,--which he thereupon did, and which was afterward abundantly corroborated by pro-slavery testimony on shore. "Mossa Cutter" had fallen heir in South Carolina to a good plantation and thirty likely "niggers." At the age of twenty-five he sold out the former and emigrated to Florida with the latter. The price of the plantation rapidly disappeared at horse-races, poker-parties, cock-fights, and rum-shops. If Mossa Cutter speculated, he was always unsuccessful, because he was always hotheaded and always drunk. In process of time "debts of honor" and the sheriff's hammer had dissipated his entire clientage of blacks, with the exception of Sol, a pretty yellow woman with a nice baby, who were respectively Sol's wife and child, and a handsome quadroon boy of seventeen, who was Mossa Cutter's body-servant. Sol came to the quarters one night and found his wife and child gone. They were on their way to Tallahassee in a coffle which had been made up as a sudden speculation on the cheerful Bourse of Jacksonville. Four doors away Mossa Cutter could be seen between the flaunting red curtains of a bar-room window, drinking Sol's heart's blood at sixpence the tumblerful. Sol, I hear they are going to put an English musket in your hands!