got up that idea there in Virginia of buying up whole loads of negroes in

Delaware and Virginia and Tennessee, very quiet, having papers drawn to

have them delivered at a place in Alabama and take them and pay for them,

away yonder at a certain time, and then in the meantime get a law made

stopping everybody from selling negroes to the south after a certain day

-it was somehow that way--mercy how the man would have made money!

Negroes would have gone up to four prices. But after he'd spent money

and worked hard, and traveled hard, and had heaps of negroes all

contracted for, and everything going along just right, he couldn't get

the laws passed and down the whole thing tumbled. And there in Kentucky,

when he raked up that old numskull that had been inventing away at a

perpetual motion machine for twenty-two years, and Beriah Sellers saw at

a glance where just one more little cog-wheel would settle the business,

why I could see it as plain as day when he came in wild at midnight and

hammered us out of bed and told the whole thing in a whisper with the

doors bolted and the candle in an empty barrel. Oceans of money in it

-anybody could see that. But it did cost a deal to buy the old numskull

out--and then when they put the new cog wheel in they'd overlooked

something somewhere and it wasn't any use--the troublesome thing

wouldn't go. That notion he got up here did look as handy as anything in

theworld; and how him and Si did sit up nights working at it with the

curtains down and me watching to see if any neighbors were about. The

man did honestly believe there was a fortune in that black gummy oil that

stews out of the bank Si says is coal; and he refined it himself till it

was like water, nearly, and it did burn, there's no two ways about that;

and I reckon he'd have been all right in Cincinnati with his lamp that he

The Gilded Age