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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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mournful sympathy with our unfortunate hero. We beg them to drop a silent tear, and pass on. It was full late in the night when the carriage emerged, dripping and bespat- tered, out of the creek, and stood at the door of a large farm-house. It took no inconsiderable perseverance to arouse the inmates; but at last the re- spectable proprietor appeared, and undid the door. He was a great, tall, bristling Orson of a fellow, full six feet and some inches in his stockings, and arrayed in a red flannel hunting-shirt. A very heavy mat of sandy hair, in a decidedly tousled condition, and a beard of some days’ growth, gave the worthy man an appear- ance, to say the least, not particularly prepossessing. He stood for a few minutes holding the candle aloft, and blinking on our travellers with a dismal and mysti- fied expression that was truly ludicrous. It cost some effort of our senator to in- duce him to comprehend the case fully; and while he is doing his best at that, we shall give him a little introduction to our readers. Honest old John Van Trompe was once quite a considerable land-holder and slave-owner in the State of Kentucky. Having “nothing of the bear about him but the skin,” and being gifted by nature with a great, honest, just heart, quite equal to his gigantic frame, he had been for some years witnessing with repressed uneasi- ness the workings of a system equally bad for oppressor and oppressed. At last, one day, John’s great heart had swelled altogether too big to wear his bonds any longer; so he just took his pocket-book out of his desk, and went over into Ohio, and bought a quarter of a township of good, rich land, made out free papers for all |
