CHAPTER VII

.

INTRODUCTION OF THE CONTRABAND, WITH SOME REFLECTIONS THEREON--THREE MONTHS BEFORE--AUNT SYNCHY AND THE OBI POISONING--A NICE LITTLE ARRANGEMENT OF EGBERT CRAWFORD'S.

Here it becomes necessary to pause and introduce a new and altogether indispensable character. Not new to the world--sorrow for the world that it is not! Not new to the country--wo to the country that it has filled so large a place in its history! But something new in this veracious narration--the _contraband_. The negro must come in, by all means and at all hazards. Time was when romances and even histories could be written without such an introduction; but that time is past and perhaps past forever. "I and Napoleon," said the courier of Arves, relating some incident in which he had temporarily become associated with the fortunes of the Great Captain; and "I and the white man" may Sambo say at no distant day, without presumption and without outraging the dignity of position. It was a very harmless monster that Frankenstein constructed, apparently; but it grew to be a very fearful and tyrannical monster before he was quite done with it. No doubt the first black face that grinned on the Virginian shore, a couple of centuries ago, seemed more an object of mirth than of terror--and it certainly gave promise of profit. But he is a man of mirthful disposition who sees anything to laugh at in the same black face, grown older and broader and much less comical, on the shore of the same Virginia to-day. The white race and the black--the sharp profile and the broad lip--the springing instep and the protuberant heel--have been having a long tussle, with the probabilities for a while all on the side of the white: to-day the struggle is doubtful if not decided in favor of the black. "Here we go, up--up--uppy! Here we go, down--down--downy!" the children used to sing when playing see-saw with a broad plank on the fence; and _they_ understood, what their elders sometimes forget--that the rebound of extreme height is descent. One more illustration, before this train of thought necessarily ceases.

Is it not recorded in all the books of relative history, that the Normans, under William the Conqueror, invaded and subjugated Saxon England and made virtual slaves of the unfortunate countrymen of Harold? Yet who were the conquered eventually? England was Saxon within fifty years of Hastings: England is Saxon to-day. The broad bosom of the Saxon mother, even when the sire of her child was a ravisher, gave out drops of strength that moulded it in spite of him, to be at last her avenger and his master! The Saxon pirate still sweeps the seas in his descendants: the Norman robber is only heard of at long intervals when he meets his opportunity at a Balaklava. The revenges of history are fearful; and if the end of human experience is not reached in our downfall, other races will be careful never to rivet a chain of caste or color, or so to rivet it that no meddling fingers of fanaticism can ever unloose the shackle!

Perhaps it is proper as well as inevitable that the negro should have changed his place and mounted astride of the national neck instead of being trodden under the national foot. Everything else in our surroundings has changed--why not he? We do not yet quite understand the fact--it may be; but the foundations of the old in society have been broken up as effectually, within the past two years, as were those of the great deep at the time of Noah's flood. The old deities of fashion have been swept away in the flood of revolution. The millionaire of two years ago, intent at that time on the means by which the revenues from his brown-stone houses and pet railroad stocks could be spent to the most showy advantage, has become the struggling man of to-day, intent upon keeping up appearances, and happy if diminished and doubtful rents can even be made to meet increasing taxes. The struggling man of that time has meanwhile sprung into fortune and position, through lucky adventures in government transportations or army-contracts; and the jewelers of Broadway and Chestnut Street are busy resetting the diamonds of decayed families, to sparkle on brows and bosoms that only a little while ago beat with pride at an added weight of California paste or Kentucky rock-crystal. The most showy equipages that flashed last summer at Newport and Saratoga, were never seen between the bathing-beach and Fort Adams, or between Congress Spring and the Lake, in the old days; and on the "Dinorah" nights at the Academy[4] there have been new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as _outre_ and unaccustomed in their appearance as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour there on his way to the inauguration.

[Footnote 4: December 1862.]

Quite as notable a change has taken place in personal reputation. Many of the men on whom the country depended as most likely to prove able defenders in the day of need, have not only discovered to the world their worthlessness, but filled up the fable of the man who leaned upon a reed, by fatally piercing those whom they had betrayed to their fall. Bubble-characters have burst, and high-sounding phrases have been exploded. Men whose education and antecedents should have made them brave and true, have shown themselves false and cowardly--impotent for good, and active only for evil. Unconsidered nobodies have meanwhile sprung forth from the mass of the people, and equally astonished themselves and others by the power, wisdom and courage they have displayed. In cabinet and camp, in army and navy, in the editorial chair and in the halls of eloquence, the men from whom least was expected have done most, and those upon whom the greatest expectations had been founded have only given another proof of the fallacy of all human calculations. All has been change, all has been transition, in the estimation men have held of themselves and the light in which they presented themselves to each other.

Opinions of duties and recognitions of necessities have known a change not less remarkable. What yesterday we believed to be fallacy, to-day we know to be the truth. What seemed the fixed and immutable purpose of God only a few short months ago, we have already discovered to have been founded only in human passion or ambition. What seemed eternal has passed away, and what appeared to be evanescent has assumed stability. The storm has been raging around us, and doing its work not the less destructively because we failed to perceive that we were passing through anything more threatening than a summer shower. While we have stood upon the bank of the swelling river, and pointed to some structure of old rising on the bank, declaring that not a stone could be moved until the very heavens should fall, little by little the foundations have been undermined, and the full crash of its falling has first awoke us from our security. That without which we said that the nation could not live, has fallen and been destroyed; and yet we know not whether the nation dies, or grows to a better and more enduring life. What we cherished we have lost; what we did not ask or expect has come to us; the effete but reliable old is passing away, and out of the ashes of its decay is springing forth a new so unexpected and so little prepared for that it may be salvation or destruction as the hand of God shall rule. The past of the nation lies with the sunken Cumberland in the waters of Hampton Roads; its future floats about in a new-fangled Monitor, that may combat and defeat the navies of the world or go to the bottom with one inglorious plunge.[5] And this general transition brings us back to the negro, whose apotheosis is after all only a part of the inevitable, and may be only the flash before his final and welcome disappearance.

[Footnote 5: Written three days before the foundering of the Monitor off Hatteras, Dec. 31st 1862.]

Our contraband is a woman, and she comes upon the scene of action in this wise, retrospectively.

Some three months before the events recorded in the preceding chapters, to wit about the middle of March, Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, doing a thriving business in the line especially affected by such gentry, and not yet elevated to a Colonel's commission in the volunteer army by the parental forethought of Governor Edwin D. Morgan,--had occasion to visit that portion of Thomas Street lying between West Broadway and Hudson. The locality is not by any means a pleasant one, either for the eye or the other senses, and the character of the street is not materially improved by the recollection of the Ellen Jewett murder, which occurred on the south side, within a few doors of Hudson. Garbage left unremoved by Hackley festers alike on pavement, sidewalk and gutter; and a mass of black and white humanity (the former predominating) left unremoved by the civilization of New York in the last half of the nineteenth century, festers within the crazy and tumble-down tenements. Colored cotton handkerchiefs wrapping woolly heads, and shoes slouched at the heel furnishing doubtful covering to feet redolent of filth and crippled by disease--alternate with the scanty habiliments of black and white children, brought up in the kennel and reduced by blows, mud and exposure to a woful similarity of hue. The whiskey bottle generally accompanies the basket with a quart of decayed potatoes, from the grocery at the corner; and even the begged calf's-liver or the stolen beef-bone comes home accompanied by a flavor of bad gin. It is no wonder that the few shutters hang by the eye-lids, and that even the wagon-boys who vend antediluvian vegetables from castaway wagons drawn by twenty-shilling horse-frames, hurry through without any hope in the yells intended to attract custom.

Any observer who should have seen the neatly-dressed lawyer peering into the broken doors and up the black staircases of Thomas Street, would naturally have supposed his visit connected with some revelation of crime, and that he was either looking up a witness whose testimony might be necessary to save a perilled burglar from Sing Sing, or taking measures to keep one hidden who might have told too much if brought upon the witness-stand. And yet Egbert Crawford was really visiting that den of black squalor with a very different object--to find an old darkey woman who was reported as living in that street, and in his capacity as one of the eleven hundred and fifty Commissioners of Deeds of the City and County of New York, to procure her "X mark" and take her acknowledgment in the little matter of a quitclaim deed. A very harmless purpose, in itself, certainly; and yet the observer might have been nearer right in his suspicion than even the lawyer himself believed, when the whole result of the visit was taken into account.

One of the ricketty houses on the south side of the street, not far from the Ellen Jewett house, and not much further from the equally celebrated panel-house which furnished the weekly papers with illustrations of that peculiar species of man-trap a few years ago--seemed to the seeker to bear out the description that had been given him. The door was wide open, and all within appeared to be a sort of dark cabin out of which issued occasional sounds of quarrelling voices and continual puffs of fetid air foul enough to sicken the strongest stomach. He went in, as one of the lost might go into Pandemonium, impelled by an imperious necessity. He mounted the ricketty and creaking stair, with the bannister half gone and the steps groaning beneath his tread as if they contained the spirits of the dead respectability that had left them half a century before. He had been told that the old woman lived on the third floor, and though he met no one he concluded to dare the perils of a second ascent, in spite of the landing place being in almost pitchy darkness. Rushing along with a hasty step that even the gloom could not make a slower one, he felt something bump against his knees and the lower part of his body, and then something human fell to the floor with a crash that had the jingling of broken crockery blended with it.

"Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" yelled a voice. "Boo! hoo! hoo! e-e-e-gh! Mammy! Mammy!" and Crawford could just discern that he had run over and partially demolished a little negro boy carrying a pitcher, the pitcher and the boy seeming to have suffered about equally. Neither of them had any nose left, to speak of; and the little imp did not make any effort to rise from the floor, but lay there and yelled merrily. The victor in the collision did not have much time for inspection, for the moment after a door at the back end of the passage opened hurriedly, and a hideous old negro woman came rushing out, with a sputtering fragment of lighted tallow-candle in her hand, and exclaiming:

"What's de matter, Jeffy? Here am Mamma!"

"Big man run'd ober me! broke de pitcher! Boo! hoo! hoo!" yelled the black atom in reply, without any additional effort at getting up.

"Get out ob dar! d--n you, I run'd ober _you_, mind dat!" screeched out the old woman, catching sight of the dark form of Crawford. "Hurtin' leetle boys!--I pay you for it, honey!"

"I hit him accidentally," said the lawyer, who had no intention of getting into a row in that "negro quarter." "It was dark, and I did not see him. I'll pay for the pitcher."

"Will you, honey?" said the old woman, mollifying instantly. "Well den, 'spose you couldn't help it. Get up, Jeffy."

"Can you tell me whether Mrs. ---- lives on any of the floors of this house?" asked Crawford.

"Nebber mind dat, till you gib me de money!" answered the old woman, not to be diverted by any side-issues. "Dat are pitcher cost a quarter, honey!"

Crawford was feeling in his pocket for one of the quarters that yet remained in that receptacle, preparatory to going out of circulation altogether,--when the old crone, eager for the money, stuck her candle somewhat nearer his face than it had before been held. Instantly her withered face assumed a new expression of intelligence, and her hand shook so that she almost dropped the candle, as she cried:

"Merciful Lord and Marser! If dat are ain't young Egbert Crawford!"

"My name is certainly Egbert Crawford!" said that individual, very much surprised in his turn. "But who are you that know _me_?"

"Don't know his ole Aunt Synchy!" exclaimed the old woman.

"Aunt Synchy! Aunt Synchy!" said the lawyer, trying to recollect the past very rapidly, and catching some glimmers. "What? Aunt Synchy that used to live at--"

"Used to live at old Tom Crawford's. Lor bress you, yes! Why come in, honey!" and before the lawyer could answer further, he was literally dragged through the dingy door by the still vigorous old woman, and found himself inside her apartment, Master Jeffy and his pitcher being left neglected on the entry floor.

Once within the door, and in the better light afforded even by the dingy windows, Crawford had a better opportunity to observe the old woman, and he now found no difficulty in recalling something more than the name. She might have been sixty-five or seventy years of age, to judge by the wrinkles on her face and the white of her eyebrows, though her hair was hidden under a gaudy and dirty cotton plaid handkerchief and her tall form seemed little bowed by age. Two coal-black eyes, showing no diminution of their natural fire, gleamed from under those white eyebrows; and on the portions of the cheeks yet left smooth enough to show the texture of the skin, there were deep gashes that had once been the tattooing of her barbarian youth and beauty. Her hands were withered, much more than her face, and seemed skinny and claw-like. Her dress, which had once been plaid cotton gingham, was fearfully dirty and unskilfully patched with other material; and the frayed silk shawl thrown around her old shoulders might have been rescued from a rag-heap in the streets to serve that turn.

The room, as Crawford readily noticed, was almost as remarkable in appearance as the old woman herself. There was nothing singular in the bare floor, the pine table and two or three broken chairs; for something very like them, or worse, can be found in almost every miserable tenement where virtue struggles or vice swelters, in the slums of the great city. Neither was there anything notable in the smoke-greased walls and ceiling, the miserable fire-place with one cracked kettle and a red earthen bowl, and the wretched bed of rags stuck away in one of the corners, on which evidently both the old crone and Master Jeffy made their sad pretence at sleep.

But what really was singular in the appearance of the apartment, and what Crawford noted at once, although he did not allude to it until afterwards, was--first, a ghastly attempt at painting, hanging behind the chimney, representing a death's-head and cross-bones, which might have been executed by an artist in whitewash, on a ground of black muslin. Second, a hanging shelf in one corner, with a dozen or two of dingy small bottles and vials, and a rod lying across it, apparently made from a black birchen switch, peeled in sections. Third, and most important of all, a string of twine suspended from one side of the room to the other, in front of the fire-place and near the ceiling, and hung with objects that required a moment to recognize. Among them, when closely examined, could be found two or three bats, dried; a string of snake's eggs, blackened by being smoked; a tail and two legs of a black cat; a bunch of the dried leaves of the black hellebore; a snake's skin--not the "shedder" or superficial skin, but the cuticle itself, peeled from the writhing reptile; two objects that might have been spotted toads, run over by wagons until thoroughly flattened--then dried; and one object which could not well be anything more or less than the hand of a child a few weeks old, cut off just above the wrist and subjected to some kind of embalming or drying process.

The purposes of this narrative do not require the recording of all the conversation which took place between the Tombs lawyer and Aunt Synchy, when the latter had dusted off one of the miserable chairs and forced the former down into it, taking another herself, sitting square in front of him, and thrusting her face so close into his that the withered features seemed almost plastered against his own. It is enough to say that that conversation corroborated the suspicion which the first words of the crone would have engendered--that Aunt Synchy, in her younger days, had been a slave in the Crawford family, in a neighboring State where the institution had not yet been entirely abolished--and that, at last manumitted by a mistaken kindness, she had finally wandered away to the crime and misery of negro life in the great city. She retained, as people of that feudal class always do, a vivid recollection of her early life and of all the residents of the section where she had lived; and Egbert Crawford, who was in the habit of putting many questions to others, was not in the habit of answering quite so many as the old woman put to him concerning the intermediate histories of the families of which she had now lost sight for more than a quarter of a century.

In this conversation it became apparent, too, that Thomas Crawford, the father of Egbert, had been the quasi owner of Synchy, and that she retained for the son something of that singular attachment which appears to be inseparable from any description of feudality. Thomas Crawford, it would appear, had had two brothers, Richard, the father of the present Richard Crawford and of John, the soldier, both Thomas and Richard being then dead and their families in the country broken up. Another brother, John, had become very wealthy, and appeared to be living, with Mary, an only daughter, at West Falls, in the Oneida Valley. Finally, it became quite apparent that the old crone, whatever her attachment to the family of Thomas Crawford, did not hold the same feudal regard for some of the other members of the family--in short, that she had retained the memory of certain supposed early slights and injuries, quite as closely as she had done the softer and more grateful sentiments towards others.

"So Dick am rich, am he, honey? an you am poor? Tut! tut! dat is too bad for de son of ole Marser Tom!" said the old crone, after the lapse of half an hour in which both tongues had been running pretty rapidly.

"He is," said Crawford, his face expressing no strong sense of satisfaction at the recollection. "He bought property in the new parts of the city, twelve or fifteen years ago, and the rise has been so great that it has made him rich. He is now living on Murray Hill, in style, though, d--n him!" and the face now was very sinister indeed, "he has been attacked with inflammatory rheumatism and confined for some weeks to his house, so that I don't think he enjoys it all very much."

"An Uncle John's big property," the old woman went on--"Dick is to have all dat, too, you tink?"

"Yes, and Mary," answered Crawford. "Mary is a pretty little girl, and worth as much as all the property. Dick has managed to get around the old man, somehow, and if I can't stop it--"

"Eh, yes, if you can't stop 'um!" said the old crone, rubbing her skinny hands together as if this, at least, pleased her. "Has you tried, honey?"

Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, as has before been said, was much more in the habit of putting others under close cross-examination, than allowing himself to be subjected to the same sifting process. But whether he had his own motives for telling the old woman the truth, or whether he saw that those coal black old eyes were looking through him and divining all that he wished or intended--he certainly submitted to the question and told the truth, in the present instance:

"Yes, d--n him once more!"

"You want Mary and de property bofe?" asked the old woman again.

"Both!" answered the lawyer, after one more instant of hesitation and one more glance into the coal black eyes. "I don't care if you know all about it--you _daren't_ betray me, for your life!"

"Don't _want_ to, honey!" was all the old woman's reply; and the lawyer went on:

"I have been twice up at West Falls since Dick was taken ill, and I think I have set some reports in circulation there, that may make Miss Mary hesitate, if they do not change the old man's will. How will that do, Aunt Synchy--you old black anatomy? Eh?"

"Spose I am an 'atomy," said the old woman, apparently rather pleased with the epithet than otherwise. "But Lor' bress you, chile, dat won't do at all! You ain't ole enough yet!" and there was an unmistakable sneer on the withered black face, to think that any body could be so verdant.

"Ah!" said Egbert Crawford, who neither liked the sneer nor the intimation. "What more could I do, I should like to know?"

What was it that Jeremy Taylor said--that old silver-tongued Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore, in Ireland?--"No disease cometh so much with our breath, drinking from the infected lips of others, as with the vessels of our own bodies that are ready to receive it." Shakspeare says the same thing of mirth, when he records that

"A jest's prosperity lies in the ear Of him that hears it, never in the tongue Of him that makes it."

Artemus Ward, when he sets whole audiences into broad roars of laughter over his odd conceits of "carrying peppermint to General Price" or "going to be measured for an umbrella," may doubt the truth of this assertion; and Lester Wallack or Ned Sothern, when inspiring chuckles that almost threaten the life, may share in the infidelity: but let all these remember that their audiences _come_ to be amused, and that their best drolleries might fall very flat indeed at a Quaker meeting or in a hospital devoted to men with the jumping tooth-ache! The conditions of Crime are like those of Disease and Mirth--the patient must be ready before the inoculation can take place. Eve was unquestionably wishing for a break in the already dull routine of her life in Eden, before the Serpent dared to make his appearance; and Arnold had some treason crudely floating through his mind, even if not that particular treason, before the overtures of the British commander led him to the attempted betrayal of the Key of the Highlands. Egbert Crawford, Tombs lawyer, when he said to Aunt Synchy, "What more could I do, I should like to know?" meant to be understood as asserting that nothing more was in his power; but there was really in his heart the wish for aid in some higher crime to effect his purposes; and the tempter came!

"All dat goin' away from you, and nobody in de way but dat miserable chile!" was the only comment of the old woman on Crawford's last question.

"So I suppose," was the puzzled answer.

"Why don't you have a good doctor for him, honey!" asked the old woman, next.

"A good doctor?" queried Crawford, still more puzzled. "Why curse it, woman, what are you talking about? Won't he get well too soon, now, and perhaps be up at West Falls before I am more than half ready for him?"

"Oh, you poor chile--you don't half understan' dis ole woman!" chuckled the crone, delighted to find that she had puzzled the lawyer. "Spose de good doctor so good that he nebber get well? Eh, honey?"

"What? poison?" broke out the lawyer, catching at the old woman's meaning so suddenly that he could not quite control his voice.

"Hush-h-h! you fool!" hissed the old woman, rising at once, hobbling to the door and opening it suddenly--then closing it and returning to her chair. "You call yourself a lawyer, honey, and do such things as dat 'are? Done you know dem policers are sneakin' aroun' ebberywhere, up de stairways as well as ebberywhere else? An if one of dem happened to hear you speak such words, dis ole woman take a ride up to de Islan' in de Black Maria, and you go to de debbil, sure! Know all about 'em, honey--been dare afore!"

"Humph!" said the lawyer, nevertheless using lower voice even for the disclaimer. "No danger, Aunty, I guess! There are no policemen now-a-days--only Provost-Marshal Kennedy's spies, looking for traitors. But what do you mean?--that I should get a doctor to--to--put him out of the way?"

"Dats jes it, honey!" said the old woman, again rubbing her hands. "He is in de way--put him out and have de ole man's money."

"Impossible!" spoke Egbert Crawford, in a tone which would have told a close observer--and probably told the old woman--that he only meant: "I do not see how to do it."

"Give um somefin," graphically said the crone.

"What!" spoke the lawyer, almost in as loud a tone as he had before used, and rising from his chair in apparent indignation.

"Sit down, honey," said the old woman, with the same sneer in her voice that had before been apparent. "Oh, I know you is a good man and wouldn't do nuffin to hurt Cousin Dickey. Didn't kill his dog, nor nuffin, did you, honey, a good wile ago, jes because you didn't like _him_. Don't do nuffin now, if you don't want to! Let him have de girl, an de ole man's money, an--"

"Woman!" said Egbert Crawford, rising altogether this time, and pacing the floor like a man a good deal unquieted. "I hate Dick Crawford, and you know it. I want Uncle John's money and I want Mary, and he is in my way in both cases. You may as well know the whole truth--I hate him enough to 'put him out of the way,' as we have both called it, but the thing is impossible. Any doctor to whom I should speak would have me arrested at once, for though they poison they do not wish to be suspected of such operations; and there is no other way. He will get well and go up to West Falls, and then all is over!" and the lawyer sunk his head on his breast as if he had been the most ill-used of individuals.

"Not while your ole Aunty libs, Marser Egbert, if you dar do what she tells you!"

The words struck some chord previously active in the brain of Crawford. He glanced up at the string of articles on the line of twine, then stopped short in his walk, before the old woman.

"Well?"

"Oh, you see dem tings, and you is coming to it, is you, honey!" chuckled the crone. "You 'member what Aunt Synchy is, now?"

"Yes, I remember," said Crawford, "though I forget the name. You are an O--Ogee--Odee--no, O--"

"_An Obi woman!_" said the crone, rising and stretching herself to her full height, with a look that was commanding in spite of her squalor. "You 'member somefin, but not much. We be great people in Jamaica. Up in de hills 'bove Spanish Town, we are de kings and de queens. De great Obi spirit come down to us, when de moon am at its last quarter, an he tell us how to cure and how to kill. We mix de charm at midnight, wid de great Obi 'pearin' to us all de time in de smoke dat rises from de kettle, an de secret words all de time a mutterin'; and de charm works, an kills or cures 'way off hunerds of miles, 'cordin' as we want um for our friens or our enemies. Does you hear, honey?"

"I hear!" said Egbert Crawford, for the moment absorbed if not fascinated by the developments of this real or affected superstition; but not carried away, it may be believed, from the influence which this hideous old woman might be able to exert on his own fortunes.

"Mammy--you don't 'member ole Mammy?"--the old woman went on. "Captain Lewis brought Mammy an me from Jamaica more'n fifty years ago. She mus' have died when you was a little picanninny. She was de great Obi woman, de queen of dem all; and she tole me afore she died, so's I could do mos' as much. Many's de lub potion Mammy an me has mixed up, dat has made some ob de wite bosoms fuller afore dey was done workin; and many's de charm--"

"Poh! nonsense! don't say 'charm'; call it 'dose'!" broke in the lawyer, at last impatient. "I believe you can kill, whether you can cure or not, Aunt Synchy; but I am a man, with some experience in the world, and I don't believe in your Obi. All your dead cats and babies' hands and snakes yonder, are just so many tricks to influence the superstitious. _I_ know better, and they don't influence _me_!"

"Oh, dey doesn't, eh, honey? You is too smart an don't believe in de Obi?" For the moment her face was lowering and threatening--then it changed again to the same wrinkled Sphynx as before. "Nebber mind--you is my boy, an I lubs you, an so you 'sult de ole woman widout de Obi payin' you for it! Call it 'dose,' then, honey--many's de dose dat dese hans have mixed, dat has made de coffin-maker hab somefin to do and sent de property where it belonged."

"I believe you!" was the laconic comment of Egbert Crawford, when the crone, spite of his interruptions, had finished her long rigmarole. What followed may quite as well be imagined as described. Richard Crawford was doomed to be operated upon by one of those insidious and deadly vegetable poisons, outwardly applied, in which none have such horrible skill as the crones of the African race who have derived their knowledge from the West India Islands. Whether it should be brought near the head by concealment in a pillow, or near the more vital portions of the body itself through use of a bandage worn near the skin,--the effect would be the same--insensible debilitation, decline, death! But the latter plan would be much the more rapid; and in neither event, when the deed was done, would there be one mark, perceptible even to the dissecting surgeon, telling that other than natural decay had brought about dissolution.

Ten minutes afterwards, Aunt Synchy was busy compounding a _black paste_, from various preparations which she found among the vials on the shelf and under one corner of the heap of rags which she called her bed--crooning all the while a dismal attempt at a tune which made even the not-over-sensitive lawyer shudder, and putting the mixture at last into his hands with a "Lor' bress you, honey!" which might have made _any one_ shudder if he had understood the connection. Fifteen minutes later, the Tombs lawyer left Thomas Street, without the information of which he had originally come in search, but his mind now full of other things, and bearing in his mind the mental label of the prescription: "to be used as directed."

So vice buds into crime whenever opportunity offers, and the Hazaels of the world, who have believed that they never could be brought to "do this thing," pursue it with an energy and determination shaming the efforts of older offenders. Yesterday only an illicit lover: to-day the destroyer of children unborn! Yesterday only an _ordinary_ scoundrel: to-day the worst and most deadly of all murderers--the _poisoner_!

Three months later--to wit, toward the close of June--that state of affairs was existing at the house of Richard Crawford, which has before been indicated. What was it, indeed, that Josephine Harris had dimly discovered?

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