“It ’s a most remarkable thing,” replied Dick fervently, “that your views correspond exactly with my profoundest convictions.  It proves beyond question that we were made for one another.”

* * * * *

They were married three weeks later.  As each of them had just returned from a journey, they spent their honeymoon at home.

A week after the wedding they were seated, one afternoon, on the piazza of the colonel’s house, where Dick had taken his bride, when a negro from the yard ran down the lane and threw open the big gate for the colonel’s buggy to enter.  The colonel was not alone.  Beside him, ragged and travel-stained, bowed with weariness, and upon his face a haggard look that told of hardship and privation, sat the lost Grandison.

The colonel alighted at the steps.

“Take the lines, Tom,” he said to the man who had opened the gate, “and drive round to the barn.  Help Grandison down,—­poor devil, he ’s so stiff he can hardly move!—­and get a tub of water and wash him and rub him down, and feed him, and give him a big drink of whiskey, and then let him come round and see his young master and his new mistress.”

The colonel’s face wore an expression compounded of joy and indignation,—­joy at the restoration of a valuable piece of property; indignation for reasons he proceeded to state.

“It ’s astounding, the depths of depravity the human heart is capable of!  I was coming along the road three miles away, when I heard some one call me from the roadside.  I pulled up the mare, and who should come out of the woods but Grandison.  The poor nigger could hardly crawl along, with the help of a broken limb.  I was never more astonished in my life.  You could have knocked me down with a feather.  He seemed pretty far gone,—­he could hardly talk above a whisper,—­and I had to give him a mouthful of whiskey to brace him up so he could tell his story.  It ’s just as I thought from the beginning, Dick; Grandison had no notion of running away; he knew when he was well off, and where his friends were.  All the persuasions of abolition liars and runaway niggers did not move him.  But the desperation of those fanatics knew no bounds; their guilty consciences gave them no rest.  They got the notion somehow that Grandison belonged to a nigger-catcher, and had been brought North as a spy to help capture ungrateful runaway servants.  They actually kidnaped him—­just think of it!—­and gagged him and bound him and threw him rudely into a wagon, and carried him into the gloomy depths of a Canadian forest, and locked him in a lonely hut, and fed him on bread and water for three weeks.  One of the scoundrels wanted to kill him, and persuaded the others that it ought to be done; but they got to quarreling about how they should do it, and before they had their minds made up Grandison escaped, and, keeping his back steadily to the North Star, made his way, after suffering incredible hardships, back to the old plantation, back to his master, his friends, and his home.  Why, it ’s as good as one of Scott’s novels!  Mr. Simms or some other one of our Southern authors ought to write it up.”