How could I ever face Morgan Town again? I,
caught in flagrant delict of smuggling away an
escaped slave! O cruel Quaker family—perfidious
Clays—who had made me their instrument
and scapegoat. How had I deserved this? Bang!
A rifle was fired; the ball perforated Pompey’s
hat, but did no harm. And now, the foaming
horses rushed down with a splash into the ford,
struggled through, dashing the water to left
and right, panted up the slope, and galloped
towards Union.

“Doctor, I owe you more than life. I am a
free man!” said the runaway.

I looked back. The negro hunters, ill-
mounted for such a chase, were giving up
the pursuit. I saw their furious gestures,
and heard their shouts of rage as they reined
up at the river’s edge. In an hour, we
were in Union, where Cato left me with many
excuses and thanks. I answered not a word,
but I was the most miserable of men. I dared
not go back to Morgan Town, where,
indeed, I was burned in effigy in the same fire
that consumed all my effects. What
happened to the Clays I never heard. Cato
Hammond rejoined his wife in safety, and is now a
thriving engineer at Montreal, in Canada. My
ruin was strangely compensated by a subscription
or “testimonial” from the abolitionists of
Philadelphia and Boston; so that I was
actually enabled to return home to buy a London
practice, and become a Benedict, a whole
twelvemonth earlier than I had pictured in my
wildest dreams.

    PORTABLE PROPERTY IN LAND.

A SHORT time back, was given in this journal
an account of a certain Irish Revolutionary
Convention, which has confiscated, by way of
public auction, the estates and interests of divers
suspects who had traitorously incumbered
themselves beyond their strength. The legal
atrocities of this terrible tribunal, its rough and
savage justice, and wholesale slaughter of
innocent owners, mortgagers, and even unoffending
solicitors, are now matters of history. Their
guillotine—their hammer, that is—descended with
a fatal precision, and the executioners pursued
their truculent task, steeped to the armpits in
the gore of slaughtered mortgages, deeds,
settlements, charges, and contingent terms. We
actually slipped in the pool of innocent ink.
While aloft sat the three pitiless Commissioners
of Public Safety, Judge Robespierre (Chief
Commissioner), Judges Marat and Danton,
carrying out their frightful office.

Naturally, this machinery, based upon rough
wholesale principles, and working with broad
and sweeping strokes, came by-and-by to be
regulated by nicer and more discriminating
adjustments. The huge Nasmyth fulling hammers
which kept pounding malleable mortgages,
settlements, and all the equities, into one monster
mass, might be so far controlled as to be
capable of the delicate manipulation of an airy
leasehold interest, almost as inappreciable as
the famous needle. This grand forging principle
once established, it would be easy to multiply
it in all manner of appliances, and even
refinements; and now, Judge Longfield, who has
been, so to speak, foreman of the works for
many years back, comes to us with a little
ingenious bit of mechanism of his own, and with
his skill and experience has a very just title to
our attention. It is proposed here, in a few
words, to explain this rather novel scheme,
which indeed seems no more than a legitimate
corollary to the famous Incumbered Estates
Act.

It will be borne in mind to what a very simple
expression the intricate algebra of title in
Ireland has been reduced. Abstracts of title,
searches simple and negative, copies of deeds,
settlements and counterparts of leases, charges
and terms of years, the groping after a tenure
by hapless chamber counsel through the brakes
and quagmires of faded scrivenery, these things
have all been swept away by the legal besoms.
Stout navvies have been sent into those dungeon
cellars, and have carted away load after load of
the old bones, digging into the rotting adherent
masses of discoloured vellum and decaying bales
of scribbled paper. After which stable work, and
a prodigious deal of winnowing and sifting,
remains at the bottom a clear sediment or deposit,
and we hold in our hands a clean bright square
of vellum, which can be read through within a
space of five minutes. Judge Prospero has
waved his ruler; and the grim fortress of hideous
old Giant Blunderbore comes crashing down in
a dust and crumble of ruin, and discovers the
amiable little Fairy, Good Title, standing
un-harmed in the middle.

That little square of parchment, as we all
know, is unimpeachable. It cannot be cut or
shredded, or, morally speaking, have a hole picked
in it; still less can it be visited by the tremendous
operation of being driven through by a coach-
and-six. It is saturated with the parliamentary
elixir, which is omnipotence. It bids defiance to
the powers of darkness and to ingenious solicitors.
It is victorious and unconquerable. No
one, to use the proper technical phrase, can “go
behind its back;” that is, apart from the small
accommodation it would afford for such
concealment, it has the power of healing all flaws
and fatal errors prior to its own. That small
sheet may be the adequate and most
convenient token for a rental of fifty thousand as for
fifteen pounds a year—a vellum bank-note whose
specie is land, and which can be converted into
specie at a moment’s warning.

This facility of transfer is a very precious
element in the value of any commodity; for the truth
of which principle we have no need to visit the
political economists. The old monster armoire
that groans and strains as it is stirred, and can
by no means be brought down stairs, is held
in poor estimation beside that compact little
casket which we can take to market with
us and dispose of out of hand. Our estate,
instead of being a huge unmanageable monster,
which we can divest ourselves of only by slow