My mother died when I was scarce five years old; and save the blurred beauty of that reproachful phantom,--caught and lost, caught and lost, by the unfaithful eyes of a graceless spirit,--she is as though she never had been. But in her place she left me a vicarious mother,--old, foolish, doting, black,--the youngest, loveliest, wisest, fairest lady I have ever known,--young with the youth of the immortal heart, lovely with the loveliness of the gleaning Ruth, wise with the wisdom of the most blessed among mothers when she "pondered all those things in her heart," and fair with the fairness of her who goeth her way forth by the footsteps of the flock, and feedeth her kids beside the shepherds' tents,--black, but comely. "Aunt Judy,"--Judith was her company name,--as the oldest of my uncles and aunts, and other boys' grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the rest of us children, delighted to call her,--was pure negro; not grafted, scandalous mulatto, nor muddled, niggerish "gingerbread," but downright, unmixed, old-fashioned blackamoor. Her father and mother were genuine importations from the coast of Africa, snatched from some cannibal's calaboose,--where else they might have been butchered to make a Dahomeyan holiday,--and set up in a country gentleman's kitchen in Maryland, where they and their Christian progeny helped to make many a happy Christmas. Of this antique Ethiopian couple I remember nothing,--they died long before I was born,--nor have I gathered any notable _ana_ concerning them. Only of the father, I learned from my darling old nurse that he was one hundred and four years old when the Almighty Emancipator set him free; and from my father, and the brothers and sisters of my mother, that he possessed in a remarkable degree those simple, childlike virtues, characteristic of the original domesticated African, which his daughters Judith and Rachel so richly inherited.