"If you want to be alone, have you no knife to stick over the door-latch, that you must have a troop of horse to guard your meeting-house?" The peddler took the hint, and closed the door immediately, using the precaution suggested by the dragoon. "A faint heart, Captain Wharton, would do but little here. Come, here is a black shroud for your good-looking countenance," taking, at the same time, a parchment mask, and fitting it to the face of Henry. "The master and the man must change places for a season." "I don't t'ink he look a bit like me," said Cæsar, with disgust, as he surveyed his young master with his new complexion. "Stop a minute, Cæsar," said the peddler, with a drollery that at times formed part of his manner, "till we get on the wool." "He worse than ebber now," cried the discontented African. "A t'ink colored man like a sheep! I nevver see sich a lip, Harvey; he most as big as a sausage!" "There is but one man in the American army who could detect you, Captain Wharton," said the peddler. "And who is he?" "The man who made you prisoner. He would see your white skin through a plank. But strip, both of you; your clothes must be exchanged from head to foot." Cæsar, who had received minute instructions from the peddler in their morning interview, immediately commenced throwing aside his coarse garments, which the youth took up and prepared to invest himself with. In the manner of the peddler there was an odd mixture of care and humor. "Here, captain," he said, taking up some loose wool, and beginning to stuff the stockings of Cæsar, which were already on the legs of the prisoner; "some judgment is necessary in shaping this limb. You will display it on horseback; and the southern dragoons are so used to the brittle-shins that, should they notice your well-turned calf, they'd know at once it never belonged to a black." "Golly!" said Cæsar, with a chuckle that exhibited a mouth open from ear to ear, "Massa Harry breeches fit." "Anything but your leg," said the peddler, coolly pursuing the toilet of Henry. "Slip on the coat, captain, over all. And here, Cæsar, place this powdered wig over your curls, and be careful and look out of the window whenever the door is open, and on no account speak, or you will betray all." "I s'pose Harvey t'ink a colored man has no tongue like oder folk," grumbled the black, as he took the station assigned him. Everything was now ready for action, and the peddler very deliberately went over the whole of his injunctions to the two actors in the scene. The captain he conjured to dispense with his erect military carriage, and for a season to adopt the humble paces of his father's negro; and Cæsar he enjoined to silence and disguise, so long as he could possibly maintain them. Thus prepared, he opened the door and called aloud to the sentinel, who had retired to the farthest end of the passage.