CHAPTER I.
On the precise day on which this story opens--some sixty or more years ago, to be exact--a bullet-headed, merry-eyed, mahogany-colored young darky stood on the top step of an old-fashioned, high-stoop house, craning his head up and down and across Kennedy Square in the effort to get the first glimpse of his master, St.George Wilmot Temple, attorney and counsellor-at-law, who was expected home from a ducking trip down the bay.
Whether it was the need of this very diet, or whether St.George had felt a sudden longing for the out-of-doors, is a matter of doubt, but certain it is that some weeks before the very best shot in the county had betaken himself to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accompanied by his guns, his four dogs, and two or three choice men of fashion--young bloods of the time--men with whom we shall become better acquainted as these chronicles go on--there to search for the toothsome and elusive canvas-back for which his State was famous.
That the darky was without a hat and in his shirt-sleeves, and it winter--the middle of January, really--the only warm thing about him being the green baize apron tied about his waist, his customary livery when attending to his morning duties--did not trouble him in the least.
Marse George might come any minute, and he wanted to be the first to welcome him.
For the past few weeks Todd had had the house to himself.

Coal-black Aunt Jemima, with her knotted pig-tails, capacious bosom, and unconfined waist, forty years his senior and ten shades darker in color, it is true, looked after the pots and pans, to say nothing of a particular spit on which her master's joints and game were roasted; but the upper part of the house, which covered the drawing-room, dining-room, bedroom, and dressing-room in the rear, as well as the outside of the dwelling, including even the green-painted front door and the slant of white marble steps that dropped to the brick sidewalk, were the especial property of the chocolate-colored darky.
To these duties was added the exclusive care of the master himself--a care which gave the boy the keenest delight, and which embraced every service from the drawing off of St.George Wilmot Temple's boots to the shortening of that gentleman's slightly gray hair; the supervision of his linen, clothes, and table, with such side issues as the custody of his well-stocked cellar, to say nothing of the compounding of various combinations, sweet, sour, and strong, the betrayal of whose secrets would have cost the darky his place.
"Place" is the word, for Todd was not St.George's slave, but the property of a well-born, if slightly impoverished, gentleman who lived on the Eastern Shore, and whose chief source of income was the hiring out to his friends and acquaintances of just such likely young darkies as Todd--a custom common to the impecunious of those days.
As Mr.Temple, however, did not come under either one of the above-mentioned classes--the "slightly impoverished gentleman" never having laid eyes on him in his life--the negotiations had to be conducted with a certain formality.

Todd had therefore, on his arrival, unpinned from the inside of his jacket a portentous document signed with his owner's name and sealed with a red wafer, which after such felicitous phrases as--"I have the distinguished honor," etc .-- gave the boy's age (21), weight (140 pounds), and height (5 feet 10 inches)--all valuable data for identification in case the chattel conceived a notion of moving further north (an unnecessary precaution in Todd's case).
To this was added the further information that the boy had been raised under his master's heels, that he therefore knew his pedigree, and that his sole and only reason for sparing him from his own immediate service was his own poverty and the fact that while under St.George's care the boy could learn how "to wait on quality." As to the house itself--the "Temple Mansion," as it was called--that was as much a part of Kennedy Square as the giant magnolias gracing the park, or the Noah's Ark church, with its quaint belfry and cracked bell, which faced its shady walks.

Nobody, of course, remembered how long it had been built--that is, nobody then alive--I mean the very date.

Such authorities as Major Clayton were positive that the bricks had been brought from Holland; while Richard Horn, the rising young scientist, was sure that all the iron and brass work outside were the product of Sheffield; but in what year they had all been put together had always been a disputed question.
That, however, which was certain and beyond doubt, was that St.George's father, old General Dorsey Temple, had purchased the property near the close of the preceding century; that he had, with his characteristic vehemence, pushed up the roof, thrust in two dormer windows, and smashed out the rear wall, thus enlarging the dining-room and giving increased space for a glass-covered porch ending in a broad flight of wooden steps descending to a rose-garden surrounded by a high brick wall; that thus encouraged he had widened the fireplaces, wainscoted the hall, built a new mahogany spider-web staircase leading to his library on the second floor, and had otherwise disported himself after the manner of a man who, having suddenly fallen heir to a big pot of money, had ever after continued oblivious to the fact that the more holes he punched in its bottom the less water would spill over its top.