midnight
He had heard of earthquakes taking place at intervals of hundreds of years , and he knew that the times of the hurricane were not calculable ; but , patient and still as was his own existence , he had never thought whether there might not be a convulsion of human affections , a whirlwind of human passion , preparing under the grim order of society in the colony . If a master died , his heir succeeded him ; if the `` force '' of any plantation was by any conjuncture of circumstances dispersed or removed , another negro company was on the shore , ready to re-people the slave-quarter . The mutabilities of human life had seemed to him to be appointed to whites -- to be their privilege and their discipline ; while he doubted not that the eternal command to blacks was to bear and forbear . When he now looked upon his boys , and remembered that for them this order was broken up , and in time for them to grasp a future , and prepare for it -- that theirs was the lot of whites , in being involved in social changes , he regarded them with a far deeper solicitude and tenderness than in the darkest midnight hours of their childish illnesses , or during the sweetest prattle of their Sabbath afternoons , and with a far stronger hopefulness than can ever enter the heart or home of a slave . They had not his habitual patience ; and he saw that they were little likely to attain it ; but they daily manifested qualities and powers -- enterprise , forecast , and aspiration of various kinds , adorning their youth with a promise which made their father sigh at the retrospect of his own . He was amused , at the same time , to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity , to which he had either not been prone , or which he had early extinguished . He detected in each the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their military accomplishments to those with whom they were always exchanging thoughts over the ridge .