"You tell him," said Dirk.

"Very well," said the other, who turned out to be Peter and the son of Peter who had a dairy farm near the North River in New York until he sold it and now relaxed at a pub on the river at the place where the packet ships came in from England with news of the London stock exchange. It was their pa who saw that if they could get the London market prices from New York to Philadelphia faster than a horse, why, you could do very well indeed for what was in the London newspapers was, to all intents, the future, and if you knew the future you could be made a rich man with your winnings on the stock exchange. And to this end he had given his sons sufficient to rent fifty carrier pigeons from a gent residing in that City of Brotherly Love.

And that had been their business for three months, and they had made the thousand dollars they wished to have, and now they were off, but the gent who rented them the pigeons had refused to take them back on account of some clever cancellation clause (which was a great old birkin for no one wrote a thing). This bastard rentier was, at this moment, in his cabin, and they were eager to watch his face when he came to see their cancellation clause, now piling on the deck.

They said I should wait and see the show, but I did not have the taste for it. They had made me feel too old for pigeons or cotton or anything but being a servant to a waxwork effigy.

I reached the boardinghouse at dusk and found Mathilde and her mother gone.

WHEN DEALING WITH SERVANTS, abandon all your normal nuance, irony, humor. Play no word games, nor make assumptions. Say exactly what service you require and then repeat it once and only once. In this way you will discover your servants are more intelligent than you supposed.

Whether he was aware of his habit or not, my father gave that advice, in pretty much those words, every quarter day, and he continued to do so in his letters to me in America, an eccentricity perhaps, but no less valuable for that. Certainly I followed his precepts in dealing with my convict forger. In the case of his visit to New York, I specified the book I wished him to buy and the date of his return.

When he did not return on the Monday, his absence engendered considerable weather in my mind; first a fear that I had propelled him into a cruel domestic trauma; second a rage that he had not obeyed me. These two feelings may appear contradictory, but a hammer and a nail can make them all the one.

Beside all this, a circumstance had changed, which we will come to in just a moment. As a result, I had made arrangements to depart Philadelphia on the Tuesday, traveling to New Haven aboard the Zeus, Captain Elihu Cammer. Until my fellow missed the Phoenix on the Monday this would have been easily done. The following morning, there were only two hours between the daily arrival of the Phoenix and the weekly departure of the Zeus, although with feuding owners, reckless races, and bursting boilers these timetables were at best approximate.

Still, I was a young man in love, impatient, sleepless. I could not pace in my house awaiting news. I would be down on the dock when the Phoenix was due to arrive. And if this meant I must pack my servant's trunk, then my father would never know I had kneeled before it. In any case, I had less curiosity about his possessions than the contents of a rat's nest. There was a great deal of strange paper which I had no time to read-maps, engravings of one sort or another. It was my own trunk that presented the greater upset. Who would have thought silk stockings were difficult to contain, a court jacket so resistant to lying flat. Naturally I made a hash of it, but I was now prepared for the dash to the New Haven steamboat, if Mr. Parrot should present himself again.

Duponceau kindly arranged a Negro to transport my trunks and myself to the Crooked Billet Wharf with clear instruction he was not to leave my side. His name was "James" which seemed immensely comic because he was black as coal, but it was clearly no joke to him and he looked me in the eye as if he were a senator.

"Yes, sir, Mr. Duponceau," said he. "I will not leave the gentleman's side."

This James was the proud owner of a coarse tweed suit, patched and darned about its knees and cuffs. He had very short trousers, two odd gloves, and a low-crowned, broad-brimmed hat which he lifted at the slightest excuse. Once at the Crooked Billet, however, he clearly indicated that he would not unload as he had been ordered, but would instead remain on his box seat. He paused to lean forward and spit a bright yellow stream of tobacco, an action immediately mimicked by his horse's arse. He would safeguard my boxes, sir, as he had promised.

I had a mind to put him in his place but I heard a foghorn and understood the Phoenix might be early. Therefore, in company with a fishwife and a press of burghers, I strolled out on the jetty and peered into the mist and coal smoke, which had democratically arranged its factions in stripes of brown and white, the whole illuminated most tremulously. From this spectral effluence appeared the Phoenix, looming high, klaxon loud. On the starboard side, as it drifted silently toward the dock, stood what might have been the emblem of America: frock-coated, very tall and straight, with a high stovepipe hat tilted back from his high forehead. I thought this is the worst vision of democracy-illiterate, hard as wood, overdressed, uncultured, with that physiognomy I had earlier observed in the portrait of the awful Andrew Jackson-a face divided proudly in three equal parts: hairline to eyebrows, eyebrows to nose, lips to chin. In other words, the face of one who will never give any weight to the wisdom of his betters. To see the visage of their president is to understand that the farmer and the mechanic are the lords of the New World. Public opinion is their opinion; the public will is their will. This was on no account what I hoped to find.

The specter raised a hand in salute and I realized it was my own servant. You can say this was due to myopia. I would say it was on account of fancy dress, the American habit of changing oneself from one thing to another which seems to be the national occupation, for they did not come all this way, as one of them said to me, "to stay the way I were." The air was perfumed by salt and industry. The rogue raised his other hand and in it I made out a thin oblong brown package which must certainly be Tartuffe. This was what I had waited for, what had kept me awake, and in a very few minutes he and I were side by side like partners, following behind James and his cart toward the Hitheren Wharf, where the Zeus was coaling.

When we were finally above the wharf I looked hard at John Larrit to see if he was damaged by his journey. Certainly his dress suggested he had become insolent, but seeing him at close quarters I relaxed sufficiently to wonder at the domestic situation he had found his wife in. I did not chastise him for his lateness.

"I have heard from Miss Godefroy's father," I said to him, rather to my own surprise.

He smiled at me. "Hey-ho," said he.

"The letter came not two hours after you departed. Written on his own account without encouragement."

"Everyone wants to meet the governor."

"Commissioner," I said. "And you have the book?"

He patted the side pocket of his frock coat. I could rehearse it on the voyage. I would know it word-perfect before we were as far as Exeter.

"And all was well with your wife?"

"Of course," he said, rather tersely.

We were by now descending a clay cutting to where the Zeus lay moored in a stench of mist and fish and coal.

The incorrigible James loaded our trunks together, side by side on his massive back. I thought, Should I tip him? Could he possibly be a slave?