And there, conspicuous among the camp-followers, with a fund of good humor and laughter rich enough to keep the whole rear of the army in spirits, even when cut down to short rations and pushed to long marches--there, gigantic as life and shaggy with bear-skin from top to toe, was our old friend Big Black Burl--Cap'n Rennuls, the Fighting Nigger, the Big Black Brave with a Bushy Head, Mish-mugwa--whom we left twenty-four years ago in the Paradise, treading with unmoccasined feet the peace-path, and filling the resounding woods from morning till night with the echoes of his peace-songs. Yes, as gigantic as life, and still as jolly as gigantic, with never a regret in all these years of servile toil that he had sewed it up in his bear-skin cap instead of accepting at once the priceless blessing which his good mistress, in the unspeakable gratitude of her mother's heart, had bidden him to take as his forever.
Time and the world had evidently dealt kindly by our hero, the ebony smoothness of his wide-snouted mug unfurrowed as yet by those lines of care and thought we so often find disfiguring the faces of Shem and Japheth, nor grizzled yet his fleecy locks, although he had left his fiftieth year behind him--an age when the heads of most men begin to whiten under the snows of life's winter. For all that, though they may not have brought him wrinkles and whitened his locks, the passing years had brought him wisdom and whitened the color of his thoughts, once so crimson. In proof whereof, he had long since taken unto himself a wife, and was now the father of a large family of large children. In further proof, he had long since left off fighting and gone to preaching, there being now in the Paradise more black sinners to be mended than red heathen to be demolished; more friends to be led across the Jordan than foes to be driven across the Ohio.
Preaching, in a general way, is a good thing, and, in a particular way, to him who loves to hear himself talk, a pleasant thing, and if he talks well, rather pleasant to others. Now, the Fighting Nigger loved to hear himself talk, but unlike many--too many--inflicted with that infirmity he talked well, as we have had frequent occasion to notice; while again, unlike the majority of the few who talk well, he listened well, which, also, we have once or twice remarked. As his walks through life should lead him no more upon the war-path, and as his color and condition forbade his taking the stump, or appearing at the bar, or sitting in the senate-house, he needs must take to preaching, as the only shift by which he could hope to retain that preëminence among his fellows which his prowess in arms had won for him. Such a calling would give his oratorical powers full scope--a desperate revival among the ebony brotherhood, from time to time, with two or three funeral-sermons to each lay brother or lay sister of peculiar sanctity, being just the thing to set them off to the highest advantage. Nor would this be all. While making the great display, he would be doing a little good--casting bread upon the waters, to be found many days hence; _i.e._, spreading the glad tidings of damnation to nearly everybody born to die, and of salvation to a select few--just enough to keep the angels from getting lonesome--conspicuous among whom were our good old Abram, John Calvin, and Burlman Reynolds.