The Widow was accustomed to say, "It takes a good deal of elbow-grease to keep everything trig and shiny"; and though she was by no means sparing of her own, the neat and thriving condition of the household and the premises was largely owing to the black Chloe, her slave and servant-of-all-work. When Chloe was a babe strapped on her mother's shoulders, they were stolen from Africa and packed in a ship. What became of her mother she knew not. How the Widow Lawton obtained the right to make her work from morning till night, without wages, she never inquired. It had always been so, ever since she could remember, and she had heard the minister say, again and again, that it was an ordination of Providence. She did not know what ordination was, or who Providence was; but she had a vague idea that both were up in the sky, and that she had nothing to do but submit to them. So year after year she patiently cooked meals, and weeded the garden, and cut and dried the apples, and scoured the brasses, and sanded the floor in herring-bone pattern, and tended the fish-flake till the profitable crop of the sea was ready for market. There was a melancholy expression in the eyes of poor, ignorant Chloe, which seemed to indicate that there might be in her soul a fountain that was deep, though it was sealed by the heavy stone of slavery. Carlyle said of a dog that howled at the moon, "He would have been a poet, if he could have found a publisher." And Chloe, though she never thought about the Infinite, was sometimes impressed with a feeling of its mysterious presence, as she walked back and forth tending the fish-flake; with the sad song of the sea forever resounding in her ears, and a glittering orb of light sailing through the great blue arch over her head, and at evening sinking into the waves amid a gorgeous drapery of clouds. When the moon looked on the sea, the sealed fountain within her soul was strangely stirred. The shadow of rocks on the beach, the white sails of fishing-boats glimmering in the distance, the everlasting sighing of the sea, made her think of ghosts; though the oppressive feeling never shaped itself into words, except in the statement, "I'se sort o' feared o' moonlight." So poor Chloe paced her small round upon the earth, as unconscious as the ant in her molehill that she was whirling round among the stars. The extent of her moral development was, that it was her duty to obey her mistress and believe all the minister said. She had often been told that was sufficient for her salvation, and she supposed it was so.