DOWN THE RIVER.

She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,--if, indeed, she ever

had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,--so

black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it

is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most

dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was,

though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp

shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded

muscle in all her lithe and agile frame.

Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,--if she could have

dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With

a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with

scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing

wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot

of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding

from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine

knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for

partner.

She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running

errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of

misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,--for, though all

along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she

belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to

cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she danced by night, with

her wild gyration and gesture, as naturally as a moth flies; and when

not in demand with the seigniory, was wont to perform in even keener

force and fire at the quarters, to an admiring circle of her own kind,

with ambitious imitators on the outskirts.

It was not, however, an indiscriminate assemblage even there that

encouraged her rude art. There are circles within circles, and the more

decorous of the slaves gave small favor to the young posturer, although

the patronage she received from the house enabled her to meet their

disapprobation defiantly; while to the younger portion, in the vague

sense that there was something wrong about it, her dance became

surrounded by all the attraction and allurement of seeing life. It was

not that the frowning ones did not go through many of the same motions

themselves; but theirs were occasioned by the frenzy of the religious

excitement, where pious rapture and ecstasy were to be expressed by

nothing but the bodily exertion of the Shout: the objectless dance of

the dancer was a thing beyond their comprehension, dimly at first, and

then positively, associated with sin. But she laughed them down with a

gibe; she felt triumphant in the possession of her secret, known to none

of them: her dance was not objectless, but the perpetual expression of

all emotions, whether of beauty or joy or gratitude or praise. Some one

at the house had given her a pair of little hoops with bells attached,

which she was wont to wear about her ankles, and it afforded her

malicious enjoyment to scatter her opponents by the tintinnabulation of

her step. For all that levity, she was not destitute of her peculiar

mode of adoration. For the religion of the Shout she had no absorbents

whatever; she furtively watched it, and openly ridiculed it; but she had

a religion of her own, notwithstanding,--a sort of primitive and grand

religion, Fetich though it was. She reasoned, that the kindly brown

earth produces us, bears us along on its flight, nourishes us, gives us

the delights of life, takes us back into its bosom at last. She

worshipped the great dark earth, imparted to it her confidence, asked of

it her boons. As she grew older, and her logic or her fancy

strengthened, she might have felt the sun supplying the earth, and the

beings of the earth, with all their force, and have become a

fire-worshipper, until further light broke on her, and she sought and

found the Power that feeds the very sun himself. But at present the dust

of which she was made was what she could best comprehend. So, fortified

by her inward faith, and feeling herself fast friends with the ancient

earth, she continued to ring her silver bells and spin her bare

twinkling feet with contented disregard of those, few of whom in their

unseemly worship had the faintest idea of what it was that ailed them.

Although known by various titles on the plantation, objurgatory among

the hands, facetious among the heads, such as Dancing Devil, Spinning

Jenny, Tarantella, Herodias's Daughter,--which last, simplifying itself

into Salome, became in its diminutives the most prevalent,--the creature

had a name of her own, the softest of syllables. Black and uncouth as

she was, a word, one of those the whitest and most beautiful, named her;

and since they tell us that every appellation has its significance for

the wearer, we must suppose that somewhere in her soul that white and

blossoming thing was to be found which answered to the name of Flor.

She possessed a kind of freehold in the cabin of an old negress yclept

Zoë; but she seldom claimed it, for Zoë was outspoken; she preferred,

instead, to lie down by night on a mat in Miss Emma's room, in a corner

of the staircase, on the hall-floor, oftenest fallen wherever sleep

happened to overtake her;--having so many places in which to lay her

head was very like having none at all. She was at the bidding of every

one, but seldom received a heavy blow; as for a round of angry words,

she liked nothing better. She fell heir to much flimsy finery, as a

matter of course, and to many a tidbit, cake or sweetmeat; she made

herself gaudy as a butterfly with the one, and never went into a corner

with the other. Of late, however, the finery and the delicates had

become more uncommon things: Miss Emma wore a homespun gingham, her

muslins, and Miss Agatha's, draped the windows,--for curtains and

carpets had all gone to camp; bacon had ceased to be given out to the

hands, who lived now on corn-meal and yams; the people at the house were

scarcely better off,--for, though, as no army had passed that way, the

chickens still peopled the place, they were reserved for special

occasions, and it was only at rare intervals that one indulged at table

in the luxury of a fowl. This was no serious regret to Flor on her own

account: the less viands, the less dishes, she could oftener pause in

the act of wiping a plate and perform an original hornpipe by herself,

tossing the thin translucent china, and rapping it with her knuckles

till it rang again. She had, however, a pang once when she saw Miss

Emma lunching with relish on cold sweet potato. She spent all the rest

of the day floating on the tide in an old abandoned scow secured by a

long rope to the bank, and afterwards wading up and down the bed of a

brook that ran into the river, until, having left a portion of her

provision, to be sure, at Aunt Zoë's cabin, she busied herself over a

fire out-of-doors, and served up at last before Miss Emma as savory a

little terrapin stew as ever simmered on coals, capering over her

success, and standing on her head in the midst of all her scattered

embers, afterwards, with pure delight. The next day she came in at noon

from the woods, a mile down the river-bank, with her own dark lips cased

and coated in golden sweets, and, after a wordy skirmish with the cook,

presented to Miss Emma a great cake of brown and fragrant honey from a

nest she had discovered and neglected in better seasons, and said

nothing about her half-dozen swollen and smarting stings. Mas'r Rob

having shouldered his gun and taken himself off, and Mas'r Andersen

having followed his example, but not his footsteps, long ago, there was

nobody to fill the deficiencies of the larder with game; and thus Flor,

with her traps and nets and devices, making her value felt every day,

became, for Miss Emma's sake, a petted person, was put on more generous

terms with those above her, and allowed a freedom of action that no

other servant on the place dreamed of desiring. Such consideration was

very acceptable to the girl, who was well content to go fasting herself

a whole day, provided Miss Emma condescended to her offerings, and, in

turn, vouchsafed her her friendship. She had no such daring aspirations

towards the beautiful Miss Agatha, young Mas'r Andersen's wife, and

admired her at an awful distance, never venturing to offer her a bit of

broiled lark, or set before her a dish of crabs,--beaming back with a

grin from ear to ear, if Miss Agatha so much as smiled on her, breaking

into the wildest of dances and shuffling out the shrillest of tunes

after every such incident. Moreover, Miss Agatha was hedged about with a

dignity of grief, and the indistinct pity given her made her safe from

other intrusion; for Mas'r Andersen, in bringing home a Northern wife,

had brought home Northern principles, and, in his sudden escape forced

to leave her in the only home she had, was away fighting Northern

battles. This was a dreadful thing, and Mas'r Andersen was a traitor to

somebody,--so much Flor knew,--it might be the Government, it might be

the South, it might be Miss Agatha; her ideas were nebulous. Whatever it

was, Mas'r Rob and his gun were on the other side, and woe be to Mas'r

Andersen when they met! Mas'r Rob and his friends were beating back the

men that meant to take away Flor and all her kind to freeze and starve;

'twas very good of him, Flor thought, and there ceased consideration.

Meanwhile, wherever Mas'r Andersen might be, and whether he were so much

as alive or not, Miss Agatha was not the one that knew; and Flor adapted

many a rigadoon to her conjectured feelings, now swaying and bending

with sorrow and longing, head fallen, arms outstretched, now hands

clasped on bosom, exultant in welcome and possession.

The importance to which Flor gradually rose by no means led her to the

exhibition of any greater decorum; on the contrary, it seemed to impart

to her the secret of perpetual motion; and, aware of her impunity, she

danced with fresher vigor in the very teeth of her censurers and their

reproaches.

"Go 'long wid yer capers, ye Limb!" said Zoë to her, late one afternoon,

as she entered with the half of a rabbit she had caught, and, having

deposited it, went through the intricacies of her most elaborate figure

in breathless listening to an unheard tune. "Ef I had dem sticks o'

legs, dey'd do berrer work nor twirlin' me like I was a factotum."

At this, Flor suddenly spun about on the tip of one toe for the space of

three minutes, with a buzzing noise like that of a top in hot motion,

pausing at last to inquire, "Well, Maum Zoë, an' w'at's dat?" and be

off again in another whirl.

"I'd red Mas'r Henry ob sich a wurfless nigger."

"Wurfless?" inquired Flor, still spinning.

"Wuss 'n wurfless."

"How 'd y' do it?"

"I'd jus' foller dat ar Sarp," said Zoë, turning over the rabbit, and

considering whether a pepper-corn and a little onion out of her own

patch wouldn't improve the broth she meant to make of it.

"Into de swamps?" said Flor, in a high key. "Sarp's a fool. I heerd

Mas'r Henry say so. Dey'll gib him a blue-pill, for sartain."

"Humph!" said Aunt Zoë, as if she could say a great deal more.

"Tell ye w'at, Maum Zoë," replied Flor, shaking her sidelong head at

every syllable, and accentuating her remarks with her forefinger and

both her little sparkling eyes, "I'll 'form on ye for 'ticin' Mas'r

Henry's niggers run away."

"None o' yer sass here!" said Maum Zoë, with a flashing glance.

"You take my rabbit, you mus' _hab_ my sass," answered Flor, delicacy

not being ingrain with her. "W'at 'ud I cut for to de swamps, d' ye

s'pose?" she said, slapping the soles of her feet in her emphasis, and

pausing for breath. "Dar neber was a lash laid on dat back"----

"No fault o' dat back, dough," interposed Aunt Zoë.

"Dar neber was a lash on dat back. Dar a'n't a person on de place hab

sich treatem as dis yere Limb o' yourn. Miss Emma done gib me her red

ribbins on'y Sa'd'y for my har. An' Mas'r Henry, he jus' pass an' say to

me, 'Dono w'at Miss Emma 'd do widout ye, Lomy. Scairt, ye hussy!' So!"

"'Zackly. We's 'mos' w'ite, we be! How much dey do make ob us up to de

house! De leopard hab change him spots, an' we hab change our skin! W'at

's de use o' bein' free, w'en we's w'ite folks a'ready? Tell me dat!"

said Aunt Zoë, turning on her witheringly, rising from a deep curtsy and

smoothing down her apron. "Tell ye w'at, ye Debil's spinster!" added

she, with a sudden change of tone, as Flor began to mimic one of Miss

Agatha's opera-tunes and with her hands on her hips slowly balance up

and down the room, and came at last, bending far on one side, to leer up

in the face of her elder with such a smile as Cubas was wont to give her

Spanish lover in the dance. "So mighty free wid yer dancin', 'pears like

you'll come to dance at a rope's end! W'at's de use o' talkin' to you?

'Mortal sperit, it 's my b'lief dat ar mockin'-bird in de branches hab

as good a lookout!"

"Heap better," said Flor acquiescently, and beginning to hold a

whistling colloquy with the hidden voice.

"You won't bring him down wid yer tunes. He knows w'en he's well off;

he's free, he is,--swingin' onto de bough, an' 'gwine whar he like."

"Leet de chil' alone, Zoë," said a superannuated old woman sitting in

the corner by the fire always smouldering on Zoë's hearth, and leaning

her white head on her cane. "You be berrer showin' her her duty in her

place dan be makin' her discontented."

"She doan' make me disconnected, Maum Susie," said Flor. "'F he's free,

w'at's he stayin' here for? Dar 's law for dat. Doan' want none o' yer

free niggers hangin' roun' dis yere. Chirrup!"

"Dar's a right smart chance ob 'em, dough, jus' now," said Aunt Zoë,

chuckling at first, and then breaking into the most boisterous of

laughs, "Seems like we's all ob us, ebery one, free as Sarp hisse'f.

Mas'r Linkum say so. Yah, ha, ha!"

"Linkum!" said Flor. "Who dat ar? Some o' yer poor w'ite trash? Mas'r

Henry doan' say so!"

"W'a' 's de matter wid dat ar boy Sarp, Zoë?" recommenced Flor, after a

pause. "Mus' hab wanted suffin,--powerful,--to lib in de swamp, hab de

dogs after him, an' a bullet troo de head mos' likely."

"Jus' dat. Wanted him freedom," said Zoë suddenly, with crackling

stress, her eyes getting angry in their fervor, as she went on. "Wanted

him body for him own. Tired o' usin' 'noder man's eyes, 'noder man's

han's. Wanted him han's him own, wanted him heart him own! Had n' no

breff to breathe 'cep' w'at Mas'r Henry gib out. Di'n' t'ink no t'oughts

but Mas'r Henry's. Wanted him wife some day to hisse'f, wanted him

chillen for him own property. Wanted to call no man mas'r but de Lord in

heaben!"

"Wy, Maum Zoë, how you talk! Sarp had n' no wife."

"Neber would, w'ile he wor a slave."

"Hist now, Zoë!" said the old woman.

"I jus' done b'lieve you's a bobolitionist!" said Flor, with wide eyes

and a battery of nods.

"No 'casion, no 'casion," said Zoë, with the deep inner chuckle again.

"We's done 'bolished,--dat's w'at we is! We's a free people now. No more

work for de 'bominationists!" And on the point of uncontrollable

hilarity, she checked herself with the dignity becoming her new

position. "You's your own nigger now, Salome," said she.

"We? No, t'ank you. I 'longs to Miss Emma."

"You haan' no understandin' for liberty, chil'. Seems ef 'twas like

religion"----

"Ef I wor to tell Mas'r Henry, oh, wouldn' you cotch it?"

"Go 'long!" cried Zoë, looking out for a missile. "Doan' ye bring no

more o' yer rabbits here, ef ye 'r' gwine to fetch an' carry"----

"Lors, Aunt Zoë, 'pears like you's out o' sorts. Haan' I got nof'n

berrer to do dan be tellin' tales ob old women dat's a-waitin' for de

Lord's salvation?" said Flor, with a twang of great gravity,--and

proceeded thereat to make her exit in a series of lively somersaults

through the room and over the threshold.

Aunt Zoë, who, ever since she had lost the use of her feet, had been a

little wild on the subject of freedom, knew very well within that Flor

would make no mischief for her; but, except for the excited state into

which the news brought by some mysterious plantation runner had thrown

her, she would scarcely have been so incautious. As it was, she had

dropped a thought into Flor's head to ferment there and do its work. It

was almost the first time in her life that the girl had heard freedom

discussed as anything but a doubtful privilege. First awakening to

consciousness in this state, it was with effort and only lately she had

comprehended that there could be any other: a different condition from

one in which Miss Emma was mistress and she was maid seemed at first

preposterous, then fabulous, and still unnatural: nevertheless, there

was a flavor of wicked pleasure in the thought. Flor looked with a sort

of contempt on the little tumbling darkies who had never entertained it.

Ever since she was born, however, she had frequently fancied she would

like the liberty of rambling that the little wild creatures of the wood

possess, but had felt criminal in the desire, and recently she had found

herself enjoying the immunity of the mocking-bird on the bough, and was

nearly as free in her going and coming as the same bird on the wing.

During the weeks that followed this conversation Flor's dances flagged.

They existed, to be sure, but with an angularity that made them seem

solutions of problems, rather than expressions of emotion; they were

merely mechanical, for she had lost all interest in them. They became at

last so listless as to exhibit, to more serious eyes, signs of grace in

the girl. Flor wondered, if Zoë had spoken the truth, that nothing

appeared changed on the plantation: all their own masters, why so

obsequious to the driver still? This was one of the last of the great

places; behind it, the small farms, with few hands, ran up the

mountains; why was there no stampede of these unguarded slaves? She

hardly understood. She listened outside the circle of the fire on the

ground at night, where two or three old women mumbled together; she

inferred, that, though no one of them would desert Mas'r Henry, they

enjoyed the knowledge that they were at liberty to do so, if they

wished. Flor laughed a bit at this, thinking where the poor things could

possibly go, and how they could get there, if they would; but in her

heart of hearts--though all the world but this one spot was a barren

wilderness, and she never could desire to leave her dear Miss Emma, nor

could find happiness away from her--it seemed a very pleasant thing to

think that her devotion might be a voluntary affair, and she stayed

because she chose. Still she was skeptical. The abstract question

puzzled her a little, too. How came Mas'r Henry to be free? Because he

was white; that explained itself. But Miss Emma--she was white, too, and

yet somehow she seemed to belong to Mas'r Henry. She wondered if Mas'r

Henry could sell Miss Emma; and then the thought occurred, and with the

thought the fear, that, possibly, some day, he might sell her, Flor

herself, away from Miss Emma and all these pleasant scenes. After such a

thought had once come, it did not go readily. Flor let it

linger,--turned it over in her mind; gradually familiarized with its

hurt, it seemed as if she had half said farewell to the place. Better

far to be a runaway than to be sold. But if it came to that, whither

should she run? what was this world beyond? who was there in this sad

wide world to take care of a little black image? And if she waited for

it to come to that, could she get away at all? It was no wonder that in

the midst of such new and grave speculations the girl's dance grew

languid and her sharp tongue still. The earth was just as beautiful as

ever, the skies were as deep, the flowers as intense in tint, the

evening air laden with jasmine-scents as delicious as of old; but in

these few weeks Flor had reached another standpoint. It seemed as if a

film had fallen from her eyes, and she saw a blight on every blossom.

It was about this time, spring being at its flush, that some passing

guest mentioned the march of a regiment, the next day, from Cotesworth

Court-House to the first railroad-station, on its way to the seat of

war. The idea of the thing filled Miss Emma with enthusiasm. How they

would look, so many together, in the beautiful gray uniform too, to any

one standing on Longfer Hill! She longed to see the faces of men when

they took their lives in their hand for a principle. She had practised

the Bonny Blue Flag till there was nothing left of it; but if a band

played it in the open air, with the rising and falling of the wind, and

under waving banners and glittering guidons all the men with their pale

faces and shining eyes went marching by----

The end of it was, that, as her father would never have listened to

anything of the kind, Flor privately informed her of a short cut down

the river-bank and round the edge of the swamp to the foot of Longfer

Hill,--a walk they could easily take in a couple of hours. And as nobody

was in the habit of missing Flor much, and her young mistress would be

supposed, after her custom, to be spending half the day in naps, they

accordingly took it. Nevertheless, it was an exceedingly secret affair,

for Mas'r Henry had always strictly forbidden his daughter to leave his

own grounds without fit escort.

This expedition seemed to Flor such a proud and gratifying confidence,

that in her pleasure she forgot to think; she only danced round about

her mistress, with a return of her old exuberance, till the more quiet

path of the latter resembled a straight line surrounded by an arabesque

of fantastic flourishes. But, in fact, the young patrician, unaccustomed

to exertion, was well wearied before they reached the river-bank. They

had yet the long border of the swamp to skirt, and there towered Longfer

Hill. Why could they not go across, she wondered. They would sink, Flor

answered her; and then the moccasins! But there were all those green

hummocks,--skipping from one to another would be mere play,--and there

were no moccasins for miles. And before Flor could gainsay her, she had

sprung on, keeping steadily ahead, in a determination to have her own

way; and with no other course left her, Flor followed, though, at every

spring, alighting on the hummocks that Miss Emma had trodden, the water

splashed up about her bare ankles, and her heart shook within her at the

thought of fierce runaways haunting these inaccessible hollows, and the

myths of the deeper district. Before long, she had overtaken her young

mistress, and they paused a moment for parley. Miss Emma was convinced,

that, if it were no worse than this, it would be delightful. Flor

assured her that she did not know the way any longer, for their winding

path between the tall cypresses veiled in their swinging tangles of

funereal moss had confused her, and she could only guess at the

direction of Longfer Hill. This, then, was an adventure. Miss Emma took

the responsibility all upon herself, and plunged forward. Miss Emma must

know best, of course, concerning everything. Nothing loth, and gayly,

Flor plunged after.

The hummocks on which they went were light, spongy masses of greenery.

Their footprints filled at once behind them with clear dark water; there

were glistening little pools everywhere about them; the ground was so

covered with mats of brilliant blossoms that what appeared solid for the

foot was oftenest the most treacherous place of all; and at last they

stayed to take breath, planting themselves on the trunk of a fallen tree

so twisted and twined with variegated vines and flowers, and deadly,

damp fungi, that it was like some gorgeous daïs-seat. Behind them and

beside them was the darkness of the cypress groves. Before them extended

a smooth floor, a wide level region, carpeted in the most vivid verdure

and sheeted with the sunshine, an immense bed of softest moss, underlaid

with black bog, quaking at every step, and shaking a thousand diamonds

into the light. Scarcely anything stirred through all the stretch; at

some runnel along its nearer margin, where upon one side the more broken

swamp recommenced, a rosy flamingo stood and fished, and, still remoter,

the melancholy note of a bird tolled its refrain, answered by an echoing

voice from some yet inner depth of forest far away. Save for this, the

silence was as intense as the vastness and color of the scene, till it

opened and resolved itself into one broad insect hum. The children took

a couple of steps forward, under their feet the elastic sod sank and

rose with a spurt of silver jets; they sprang back to their seats, and

the shading tree above shook down a shining shower in rillets of silver

rain. They remained for a minute, then, resting there. Singularly

enough, Longfer Hill, which had previously been upon their left, now

rose far away upon the right. When at length they comprehended its

apparition, they looked at one another in complete bewilderment. Miss

Emma began to cry; but Flor took it as only a fresh complication of this

world, that was becoming for her feet a maze of intricacy.

"We must go back," said Miss Emma, at last. "I'm sure, if I'd

known----Of course we never can cross here. The very spoonbill wades.

Oh, why didn't----Well, there's no blame to you, Floss. I've nobody to

thank but myself; that's a comfort."

"Lors, Miss Emma, it's my fault altogeder. I should n' neber told ye.

An' as for gwine back, it's jus' as bad as torrer."

"We can't stay here all night! Oh, I'm right tired out! If I could lie

down"----

"'Twouldn' do no way, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a fright for her

friend, as a quick, poisonous-looking lizard slid along the log, like a

streak of light, in the wake of a spider which was one blotch of scarlet

venom.

Far ahead, the strong sun, piercing the marsh, drew up a vapor, that,

blue as any distant haze in one part and lint-white in another, made

itself aslant into low, delicious, broken prisms, melting all between.

This, more than anything else, told the extent of the bog before them,

and, hot as it was now, betrayed the deathly chill lurking under such a

coverlet at night. In every other direction lay the cypress jungle; and

whether they saw the front or back of Longfer Hill, and on which side

the river ran, steering for which they could steer for home, they had

not the skill to say. Thus, what way to go they still were undecided,

when, at something moving near them, they started to their feet in a

faint terror, delaying only a single instant to gaze at it,--a serpent,

that, coiled round the stem above, had previously seemed nothing but a

splendid parasite, and that just lifted its hooded head crusted with

gems, and flickered a long cleft tongue of flame over them, while

loosening in great loops from its basking-place. They vouchsafed it no

second look, but, with one leap over the log, through the black mire,

and from clump to clump of moss, sped away,--if that could be called

speed which was hindered at each moment by waylaying briers and

entangling ropes of blossoming vines, by delays in threatening quagmires

and bewilderments in thickets beset by clouds of insects, by trips and

stumbles and falls and bruises, and many a pause for tears and

complaints and ejaculations of despair.

Meanwhile the heat of the day was mitigated by thin clouds sliding over

the sun and banking up the horizon, though the hot wind still blew

sweetly and steadily from the open quarter of the sky.

"Oh, what has become of us?" cried Miss Emma at length, when the shadows

began to thicken, and out of the impenetrable forest and morass about

them they could detect no path.

"We's los' into de swamp, Miss Emma," answered Flor, in a kind of gloomy

defiance of the worst of it,--"da' 's all."

"And here we shall die!" cried the other.

And she flung herself, face down, upon the floor.

Flor was beside her instantly, taking her head upon her knee. Her own

heart was sinking like lead; but she plucked it up, and for the other's

sake snapped her fingers at Fortune.

"Lors, Miss, dar's so many berries we caan' starve nowes. I's 'bout to

build a fire soon's it's dark; dis yere's a dry spot, ye see now. An',

bress you, dey'll be out after us afore mornin',--de whole farm-full."

"With the dogs!" cried Miss Emma. "Oh, Floss, that I should live for

that! to be hunted in the swamp with dogs!"

Flor was silent a moment or two. The custom personally affected her for

the first time; worse than the barbarity was the indignity.

"Dey aren't trained to hunt for you, Miss Emma," she said, more gloomily

than she had ever spoken before. "Dey knows de diff'unce 'tween de dark

meat and de light."

And then she laughed, as if her words meant nothing.

"They never shall touch _you_, Flor, while I'm alive!" suddenly

exclaimed Miss Emma, throwing her arms about her.

"Lors, Miss, how you talk!" cried Flor, and then broke into a gust of

tears. "To t'ink ob you a-carin' so much for a little darky, Miss!"--and

she set up a loud howl of joyful sorrow.

"You're the best friend I've got!" answered Miss Emma, hugging her with

renewed warmth. "I love you worlds better than Agatha! And I'll never

let you leave me! Oh, Flor! what shall we do?"

Flor looked about her for reply, and then scrambled up a sycamore like a

squirrel.

It was apparently an island in the swamp on which they were: for the

earth, though damp, was firm beneath them; and there was a thick growth

of various trees about, although most were draped to the ground in the

long, dark tresses of Spanish moss, waving dismally to and fro, with a

dull, heavy motion of grief. On every other side from that by which they

had come it appeared to be inaccessible, surrounded, as well as Flor

could see, by glimmering sheets of water, which probably were too full

of snags and broken stumps, still upright, for the navigation of boats

by any hands but those thoroughly acquainted with their wide region of

stagnant pools. This island was not, however, a small spot, but one that

comprised a variety of surfaces, having not only marsh and upland within

itself, but something that in the distance bore a fearful resemblance to

a young patch of standing corn, a suspicion confirmed into certainty by

a blue thread of smoke ascending a little way and falling again in a

cloud. Once, upon seeing such a sight, Flor might have fallen to the

ground herself,--this could be no less than the abode of those sad

runaways, those mythical Goblins of the Swamp,--but it would have been

because she had forgotten then that she was not one of the strong white

race that reared her. Now, at this moment, she felt a thrill of kinship

with these creatures, hunted for with bloodhounds, as she would be

to-morrow, perhaps.

"May-be I'll not go back," said Flor.

She slipped down the tree, and went silently to work, heaping a bed of

the hanging moss, less wet than the ground itself, for her young

mistress. Miss Emma accepted it passively.

"Oh, it's like sleeping on hearse-curtains!" was all she said.

It was already evening, but growing darker with the clouds that went on

piling their purple masses and awaiting their signal. Suddenly the

sweet, soft breeze trembled and veered, there was a brief calm, and the

wind had hauled round the other way. A silence of preparation, answered

by a long, low note of thunder, and the war had begun in heaven.

Miss Emma buried her face in the moss. But Flor, secretly relishing a

good thunder-gust, drew up her knees and sat with equanimity, like a

little black judge of the clouds; for, in the moment's dull, indifferent

mood, she felt prepared for either fate. It was long before the rain

came; then it plunged, a brief downfall, as if a cloud had been ripped

and emptied,--a suffocating terror of rain, teeming with more appalling

intimations than anything else in the world. But the wind was a blind

tornado. The boughs swung over them and swept them; the swamp-water was

lifted, and gluts of it slapped in Flor's face. She saw, not far away, a

great solitary cypress rearing its head, and bearing aloft a broad

eagle's nest, hurriedly seized in the grasp of the gale, twisted,

raised, and snapped like a straw. The child began to shudder strangely

at the breath of this blast that cried with such clamor out of the black

vaults above, this unknown and tremendous power beneath which she was

nothing but a mote; she suffered an unexplained awe, as if this fearful

wind were some supernatural assemblage of souls fleeting through space

and making the earth tremble under their wild rush. All the while the

heavy thunders charged on high in one unbroken roar, across whose base

sharp bolts broke and burst perpetually; and with the outer world

wrapped in quivering curtains of blue flame, now and then a shaft of

fire lanced its straight spear down the dense darkness of the woods

behind in ghastly illumination, and a responsive spire shot up in some

burning bush that blackened almost as instantly. Flor fancied that the

lightning was searching for her, a runaway herself, and the burning bush

answered, like a sentinel, that here she was. She cowered at length and

sought the protection of the blind earth, full of awe and quaking, till

by-and-by the last discharge, muffled and ponderous, rolled away, and,

save for a muttered growl in some far distant den, the world was still

and dark again.

Flor spoke to her mistress, and found, that, utterly worn out with

fatigue and fright and exhausted electricity, she was asleep. She then

got up and wrung out the rain from portions of her own and Miss Emma's

dress, and heaped fresh armfuls of moss upon the sleeper in an original

attempt at the pack; then she proceeded to explore the neighborhood, to

see if there were any exit in other directions from the terrors of the

swamp.

Stars began to struggle through and confuse their rays with the

ravelled edges of the clouds. She groped along from tree to tree,

looking constantly behind her at the clear, light opening of sky beneath

which Miss Emma lay.

Perhaps she had come farther than she knew; for all at once, in the

dread stillness that nothing but the dripping dampness broke, a sound

smote her like a pang. It was an innocent and simple sound enough, a

man's voice, clear and sweet, though measured somewhat, and suppressed

in volume, chanting a slow, sad hymn, that had yet a kind of rejoicing

about it:--

"Oh, no longer bond in Egypt,

No longer bond in Egypt,

No longer bond in Egypt.

The Lord hath set him free!"

It came from a hollow below her. Flor pushed aside the great, glistening

leaves in silence, and looked tremblingly in. There were half-burnt

brands on a broad stone, throwing out an uncertain red glimmer; there

was an awning of plaited reeds reaching from bough to bough; there was

an old man stretched upon the ground, and a stalwart man sitting beside

him and chanting this song, as if it were a burial-service: for the old

man was dead.

Flor began to tremble again, with that instinctive animal antipathy to

death and dissolution. But in an instant a rekindling gleam of the

embers, hardly quenched, shot over the singer's face. In the same

instant Flor shook before the secret she had learned, Sarp was a

runaway, to be sure; and runaways ate little girls, she knew. But Flor,

having lately encouraged incredulity, could hardly find it in her heart

to believe that the fact of having stolen himself could have so utterly

changed the old nature of Sarp, the kind butler, who always had a

pleasant word for her when others had a cuff. Yet should she hail him?

Ah, no, never! But then--Miss Emma! Her young mistress would die of

starvation and the damp.

"Sarp!" whispered Flor, huskily.

The man started and sprang to his feet, alert and ready, waiting for his

unseen enemy,--then half relapsed, thinking it might be nothing but the

twitter of a bird.

"It's me, Sarp."

Who that was did not seem so plain to Sarp; he darted his swift glance

in her direction, then at one step parted the bushes and dragged her

through, as if it were game that he had trapped.

"Oh, Sarp!" cried Flor, falling at his feet. "Doan' yer kill me now! I

di'n' mean to ha' found yer. I's done los' in de swamp, wid"----

But Flor thought better of that.

The man raised her, but still held her out at arm's length, while he

listened for further sound behind her.

"Oh, jus' le' go, Sarp, an' I'll dance for you till I drap!" she cried.

"Is it a time for dancing," he replied, "and the earth open for

burying?"

"Lors, Sarp!" cried Flor, shrinking from the shallow grave she had not

seen, "how's I to know dat?"--and she gave herself safe distance.

"Help me yere, then," said he.

But Flor remained immovable, and Sarp was obliged to perform by himself

the last offices for the old slave, who, living out his term of

harassments and hungers, had grown gray and died in the swamps. He went

at last and brought an armful of broken sweet-flowering boughs and

spread them over the place.

"Free among the dead," he said; then turned to Flor, who, having long

since seen daylight through the darkness of her fears, proceeded glibly

and volubly to pour out her troubles, on his beckoning her away, and to

demand the help she had refused to render.

"There's the boat," said Sarp, reflectively. "And the rain will float it

'most anywheres to-night. But--come so far and troo so much to go back?"

Flor flung up her face and held her head back proudly.

"Yes, Sah! Doan' s'pose I'd be stealin' Mas'r Henry's niggers?"

For, having meditated upon it an hour ago, she was able to repel the

charge vigorously.

"Go'n' to stay a slave all your life?"

"All Miss Emma's life."

"And--afterwards"----

"Den I'll go back to de good brown earth wid her," said Flor, solving

the problem promptly.--"I doan' see de boat."

"Ah, she'll make as brown dust as you,--Miss Emma,--that's so! But the

spirit, Lome!"

"Sperit?" said Flor, looking uneasily over her shoulder with her

twinkling eyes.

"The part of you that doan' die, Lome."

"I haan' nof'n ter do wid dat; dat 'longs to dem as made it; none o' my

lookout; dono nof'n 'bout it, an' doan' want ter hear nof'n about it!"

said Flor; for, reasoning on the old adage of a bird in the hand being

worth two in the bush, she thought it more important just at present to

save her body than to save her soul, admitting that she had one, and

felt haste to be of more behoof than metaphysics.

There was a moon up now, and Flor could see her companion's dark face

above her, a mere mass of shade; it did not reassure her any to remember

that her own was just as black.

"Lome," said Sarp, setting his back against a tree like one determined

to have attention, "never mind about the boat yet. You 've heard Aunt

Zoë say how't the grace of the Lord was free?"

"Yes, I's heerd her kerwhoopin'. I 's in a hurry, Sarp!"

"But 's how't the man that refuses to accept it, when it's set before

him, is done reckoned a sinner?"

"S'pose I has?"--and in her impatience she began to dance outright.

"It's jus' so with the present hour," he continued, not giving her time

to interpose about escape again. "You have liberty offered you. If you

refuses, how can you answer for it when your spirit 'pears afore the

Judge? You choose him, and you choose righteousness, you chooses the

chance to make yourself white in the Lord's eyes,--your spirit, Lome.

Refuse, and you take sin and chains and darkness; you gets to deserve

the place where they hab their share of fire and brimstone."

"Take mine wid 'lasses," said Flor, who, though inwardly a trifle cowed,

never meant to show it. "W'a' 's de use o' boderin' 'bout all dat ar,

w'en dar 's Miss Emma a-cotchin' her deff, an' I 's jus' starved? Ef you

's go'n' to help us, Sarp"----

"You don' know what chains means, chil'," said the imperturbable Sarp.

"They're none the lighter because you can't see 'em. It a'n't jus' the

power to sell your body and the work of your hands; it's the power to

sell your soul! Ef Mas'r Henry hab de min',--ef Mas'r Henry have the

mind, I say, to make you go wrong, can you help it while you 's a

slave?"

"'Taan' no fault o' mine ter be bad, ef I caan' help it. Come now," said

Flor sullenly, seeing little hope of respite,--"should t'ink 'twas de

Ol' Sarpint hisself!"

"And 'taan' no virtue of yours to be good, ef you caan' help it; you 'd

jus' stay put--jus' between--in de brown earth, as you said. You 'd

never see that beautiful land beyond the grave, wid the river of light

flowing troo der place, an' the people singing songs before the great

white t'rone."

"Tell me 'bout dat ar, Sarp," said Flor, forgetfully.

"Dey 's all free there, Lome."

"How was dis dey got dere? Could n' walk nowes, an' could n' fly"----

"Haan' you seen into Miss Emma's prayer-book the angels with wings high

and shining all from head to foot?"

"Yes," said Flor,--"_Angels_."

"And one of them you 'll be, Lome, ef you jus' choose,--ef, for

instance, you choose liberty to-day."

"Lors now, Sarp, I doan' b'lieb a word you say! Get out wid yer

conundrums! Likely story, little black nigger like dis yere am be put

into de groun' an' 'come out all so great an' w'ite an' shinin'-like!"

"'For God shall deliver my soul from the power of the grave.'

_'Shall.'_ That's a promise,--a promise in the Book. Di'n't yer eber

plant a bean, Lome,--little hard black bean? And did a little hard black

bean come up? No, but two wings of leaves, and a white blossom jus'

ready to fly itself, and so sweet you could smell it acrost de field. So

they plant your body in the earth, Lome"----

"You go 'long, Sarp! Ef you plant beans, beans come up," said Flor,

decisively.

This direct and positive confutation rather nonplussed Sarp, his theory

not being able at once to assimilate his fact, and he himself feeling,

that, if he pushed the comparison farther, he would reach some such

atrocity as that, if the white and shining flower produced in its season

again the black bean from which it sprung, so the white and shining soul

must once more clothe itself in the same sordid, unpurified body from

which it first had sprung. He had a vague glimmer that perhaps his

simile was too material, and that this very body was the clay in which

the springing, germinating soul was planted to bloom out in heaven, but

dared not pursue it unadvised, for fear of the quicksands into which it

might betray him. He merely tied a knot in the thread of his discourse

by answering,--

"Jus' so. The bean planted, the bean comes up. You planted, and what

follows?"

"I come up," said Flor, consentingly, and quite as if he had got the

better of the discussion.

Then he rose, and Flor led the way back to Miss Emma,--having first,

upon Sarp's serious hesitation, pledged herself for Miss Emma's secrecy

and gratitude with tears and asseverations.

In spite of the fact that he had never meant nor cared to see it again,

there was something pleasant to Sarp in the face of the sleeper upturned

in a moonbeam. He stooped and lifted her tenderly, and laid her head on

his shoulder. The young girl opened her eyes vacantly, but heard Flor's

voice beside her still,--

"Doan' ye be scaret now, honey! Bress you, 's a true frien': he'll get

us shet ob dis yere swamp mighty sudd'n!"

And soothed by the dreamy motion, entirely fatigued, borne swiftly along

in strong arms, under the low, waving boughs in the dim forest darkness,

she was drowsed again with slumber, from which she woke only on being

placed in the bottom of a skiff to turn over into a deeper dream than

before. Flor nodded triumphantly to her companion, in the beginning,

keeping pace beside him with short runs,--there could be no fear of

babble about that of which one knew nothing,--and took her seat at last

in the boat as he directed, while with a long pole he pushed out into

the deeper water away from the shadow of the shore, and then went

steering between the jags and gnarls, that, half protruding from the

dark expanses, seemed the heads of strange and preternatural monsters.

Now and then a current carried them; now and then their boatman sculled,

now and then in shallower places poled along; sometimes he rested, and

in the intervals took occasion to continue his missionary labor upon

Flor,--his first object being to convince her she had a soul, and his

second that in bondage every chance to save that soul alive was against

her. Then he drew slight pictures of a different way of things, such as

had solaced his own imagination, rude, but happy idyls of freedom: the

small house, one's own; the red light in the window, a guiding star for

weary feet at night coming home to comfort and smiles and cheer; no

dark, haunting fear of a hand to reach between one and those loved

dearest; no more branding like cattle, manhood and womanhood

acknowledged, met with help and welcome and kind hands, cringing no

more, but standing erect, drinking God's free sunshine, and growing

nearer heaven. How much or how little of all his dream poor Sarp

realized, if ever he reached the land of his desire at all, Heaven only

knows. But Flor listened to him as if he recited some delightful

fairy-tale,--charming indeed, but all as improbable as though one were

telling her that black was white. Then, too, there was another dream of

Sarp's,--the dream of a whole race loosening itself from the clinging

clod. Flor got a glimmer of his meaning,--only a glimmer; it made her

heart beat faster, but it was so grand she liked the other best.

So, creeping through narrow creeks, now they skirted the edges of the

long, low, flat morass,--now wound round the giant trunk of a fallen

tree that nearly bridged the pool whose dark mantle they severed,--now

pushed the boat's head up into a wall of weeds, that bent back and let

it through the deep cut flooded by the rain, where the wild growth shut

off everything but the high hollow of a luminous sky, with

ribbon-grasses and long prickly leaves brushing across their faces from

either side, here and there a sudden dwarf palmetto bristling all its

bayonets against the peaceful night, and all the way singular uncouth

shapes of vegetation, like conjurations of magic, cutting themselves out

with minuteness upon the vast clear background so darkly and weirdly

that the voyagers seemed to be sliding along the shores of some new,

strange under-world,--now they got out, and, wading ankle-deep in plashy

bog, drew the boat and its slumberer heavily after them,--now went

slowly along, afloat again, on the broad lagoons, which the moon, from

the deep far heaven, shot into silver reaches, and, with the trees, a

phantom company of shadows, weeping in their veils along the farther

shore, with all the quaint outlines of darkness, the gauzy wings that

flitted by, the sweet, wild scents across whose lingering current they

drifted, the broad silence disturbed only by the lazy wash of a seldom

ripple, made their progress, through heavy gloom and vivid light, an

enchanted journey.

At length they lifted overhanging branches, and glided out upon a sheet

of open water, a little lake fed by natural springs; and here, paddling

over to the outlet, a tide took them down a swift brook to the river.

Sarp stemmed this tide, made the opposite bank of the brook, and paused.

"Have you chosen, Lome?" said he. "Will you go back with me, and so on

to the Happy Land of Freedom? Not that I'll have my own liberty till

I've earned it,--till I've won a country by fighting for it. But I'll

see you safe; and if I'm spared, one day I'll come to you. Will you go?"

Flor hung back a moment. "I'd like to go, Sarp, right well," said she,

twisting up the corner of her little tatter of an apron. "But dar am

Miss Emma, you see."

"We can leave her on the bank here. She'll be all right when de day

breaks, and fin' the house herself. There's as good as she without a

roof this night."

"She's neber been use' to it. She would n' know a step o' de way. Oh,

no, Sarp! I 'longs to Miss Emma; she could n' do widout me. She'd jus'

done cry her eyes out an' die,--'way here in de wood. No, Sarp, I mus'

take her back. She's delicate, Miss Emma is. I'd like to go right well,

Sarp,--'ta'n't much ob a 'sapp'intment,--I's use' to 'em,--I'd like for

to go wid you."

Lingering, irresolute, she stood up in the swaying skiff, keeping her

balance as if she were dancing; then, the motion, perhaps, throwing her

back into her old identity, she sprang to the shore like a cat. Sarp

laid Miss Emma beside her, and then shot away, back over all the

desolate reaches and lonely shining pools; and Flor, with a little wail

of despair, hid her face on the ground, that her weakened and bewildered

little mistress might not see the flood of tears that wet the grass

beneath it.

It was between two and three o'clock in the morning, when, chilled,

draggled, and dripping wet, they reached the house. Lights were moving

everywhere about it: no one had slept there that night. There was a

great shout from high and low as the two forlorn little objects crept

into the ray. Miss Emma was met with severe reproaches, afterwards with

tears and embraces; and cordial drinks and hot flannels were made ready

for her in a trice. As for Flor, she was warmed after another

fashion,--being sent off for punishment; and, in spite of the

implorations of Miss Emma and the interference of Miss Agatha, the order

was executed. It was the first time she had ever received such reward of

merit in form; and though it was a slight affair, after all, the hurt

and wrong rankled for weeks, and, instead of the gay, dancing imp of

former days, henceforth a silent, sullen shadow slipped about and

haunted all the dark places of the house.

Mas'r Henry, being a native of Charleston, was also a gentleman of

culture, and fond of the fine arts to some extent. Indeed, looking at it

in a poetical view, the feudality of slavery, even more than the

inevitable relation of property, was his strong tie to the institution.

He had a contempt for modern progress so deeply at the root of his

opinions that he was only half aware of it; and any impossible scheme to

restore the political condition of what we call the Dark Ages, and

retain the comforts of the present one, would have found in him a hearty

advocate. One of his favorite books was a little green-covered volume,

printed on coarse paper, and smelling of the sea which it had crossed: a

book that seemed to bring one period of those past centuries up like a

pageant,--so vividly, with all the flying dust of their struggle in the

sunbeam before him, did its opulent vitality reproduce, in their

splendors and their sins, the actual presences of those dead men and

women, now more unreal substance than the dust of their shrouds. He

liked to carry this mediaeval Iliad round with him, and, taking it out

at propitious places, go jotting his pencil down the page. He had heard

it called an incomprehensible puzzle of poetry; it gave him pleasure,

then, to unriddle and proclaim it plain as print. He was thus

delectating himself one day, while Flor, still in her phase of

moodiness, stood behind Miss Agatha's chair; and, the passage pleasing

him, he read it aloud to Miss Agatha, whom, in the absence of his son,

her husband, he was wont to consider his opponent in the abstract,

however dear and precious in the concrete.

"As, shall I say, some Ethiop, past pursuit

Of all enslavers, dips a shackled foot,

Burnt to the blood, into the drowsy, black,

Enormous watercourse which guides him back

To his own tribe again, where he is king;

And laughs, because he guesses, numbering

The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch

Of the first lizard wrested from its couch

Under the slime, (whose skin, the while, he strips

To cure his nostril with, and festered lip,

And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert blast,)

That he has reached its boundary, at last

May breathe; thinks o'er enchantments of the South,

Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth,

Eyes, nails, and hair; but, these enchantments tried

In fancy, puts them soberly aside

For truth, projects a cool return with friends,

The likelihood of winning mere amends

Erelong; thinks that, takes comfort silently,

Then from the river's brink his wrongs and he,

Hugging revenge close to their hearts, are soon

Offstriding to the Mountains of the Moon."

Flor stood listening, with eyes that shone strangely out of the gloom of

her face.

"Well, child," said her master to Miss Agatha, "how does that little

monodrame strike you? Which do you find preferable, tell me, Ashantee at

home or Ashantee abroad? civilized or barbarized? the institution or the

savage? Eh, Blossom," turning to Flor, "what do you think of the

condition of that ancestor of yours?"

"Mas'r Henry," said Flor, gravely, "he was free."

"Eh? Free? What! are you bitten, too?"

And Mas'r Henry laughed at the thought, and pictured to himself his

dancer dancing off altogether, like the swamp-fire she was. Then his

tone changed.

"Flor," said he, sternly, "who has been talking to you lately? Do you

know, Agatha? I have seen this for some time. I must learn what one

among the hands it is that in these times dares breed disaffection."

"No one's talked to me, Sah," said Flor,--"no one onter der place."

"Some one off of it, then."

"Mas'r Henry, I's been havin' my own t'oughts. Mas'r knows I could n'

lebe Miss Emma nowes. Could n' tief her property nowes. But ef Mas'r

Henry 'd on'y jus' 'sider an' ask li'l' Missy for to make dis chil' a

presen' ob myse'f"----

"So that's what it means!" And Mas'r Henry smiled a moment at the

ludicrous idea presented to him.

"Flor," said he then, abruptly, "I have never heard the whole of that

night in the swamp. It must be told."

"Lors, Sah! So long ago, I's done forgot it!"

"You may have till to-morrow morning to quicken your memory."

"Haan' nof'n' more to 'member, Mas'r."

"You heard me. You have your choice to repeat it either now or to-morrow

morning."

"Could n' make suf'n', whar nof'n' was. Could n' tink o' nof'n' all ter

once. Could n' tell nof'n' at all in a hurry," said Flor, with a

twinkle. "Guess I'll take tell de mornin', any-wes, Mas'r." And she was

off.

And Mas'r Henry went, back to his book,--the watcher nodding on his

spear,--and all the stormy scenes he expected soon to realize in his own

life, when the sword of conscription had numbered his old head with the

others.

Flor went out from the presence defiant, as became a rebel.

Although that special mode of martyrdom was not proper to the

plantation, and Flor felt in herself few particles of the stuff of which

martyrs are made, she was determined, that, as to telling so much as

that Sarp was still in the swamp, let alone betraying the way to his

late habitat,--even were she able,--she never would do it, though burned

at the stake. The determination had a dark look; nevertheless, two

glimmers lighted it: one was the hope, in a mistrust of her own

strength, that Sarp had already gone; the other was a perception that

the best way to keep Sarp's secret was to make off with it. She began to

question what authority Mas'r Henry had to demand this secret from her;

she answered in her own mind, that he had no authority at all;--then she

was doubly determined that he should not have it. She had heard talk of

chivalry at table and among guests; she had half a comprehension of what

it meant; she wondered if this were not a case in point,--if it were,

after all, the color, and not the sex, that weighed. That aroused her

indignation, aroused also a feeling of race: she would not have changed

color that moment with the fairest Circassian of a harem, could the

white slave have appeared in all the dazzle of her beauty.--Mas'r Henry

had called that man, of whom he read aloud to-day, her ancestor. She

knew what that was, for she had heard Miss Emma boast of her

progenitors. But he was free; then it followed that she was not a slave

by nature, only by vicious force of circumstance. Mas'r Henry had no

right to her whatever; instead of her stealing herself, he was the thief

who retained her against her will. What could be the name of the country

where that man had lived? It was somewhere a long way from this place,

down the river, perhaps beyond the sea;--there were others there, then,

still, most likely. Flor had an idea that among them she might be a

superior, possibly received with welcome, invested with honors;--she

lingered over the pleasant vision. But how was one ever to find the

spot? Ah, that book of Mas'r Henry's would tell, if she could but take

it away to those kind people Sarp had told of. So she meditated awhile

on the curious travels with Sordello for a guide-book, till old

affections smote her for having thought of taking the thing, when "Mas'r

Henry set so by it," and she put the vision aside, endeavoring to recall

in its place all that Sarp had told her of the North. She realized then,

personally, what a wide world it was. Why should she stay shut in this

one point upon it all: a hill and the fir wood behind her; marshes on

this side; woods again on the other; low hills far away before her; out

of them all, the dark torrent of the river showing the swift way to

freedom and the great sea? She drew in a full breath, as if close air

oppressed her.--A bird flew over her then, high above her head,

careering in fickle circles, and at length sailing down out of sight far

into other heavens. Flor watched him bitterly; she comprehended Zoë's

scorn of her past content;--if only she had wings to spread! But Sarp

had told her, that, if she went away, she would one day have wings. None

of Sarp's other arguments weighed a doit,--but wings to roam with over

this beautiful world! The liberty of vagabondage! She watched the clouds

chasing one another through the sunny heaven, watched their shadows

chasing along the fields and hills below; her heart burned that

everything in the world should be more free than she herself. She felt

the wind fanning over her on its way, she took the rich odors that it

brought, she looked after the flower-petal that fluttered away with it,

she saw the strong sunshine penetrating among the shadows of a jungly

spot and catching a thousand points of color in the gloom, she

recognized the constant fluent interchange among all the atoms of the

universe;--why was she alone, capable of flight, chained to one

spot?--She gazed around her at the squalor and the want, the brutish

shapes and faces, her own no better, at the narrow huts; thought of the

dull routine of work never to enrich herself, the possibility of

purchase and cruelty;--she sprung to her feet, all her blood boiling; it

seemed out of the question for her to endure it another moment.--Mas'r

Henry had told her once that he could make his fortune with her dancing,

if he chose; she stood as much in need of a fortune as Mas'r Henry,--why

not make it for herself? why not be off and away, her own mistress,

earning and eating her own bread, sending some day for Zoë, finding Sarp

in those far-off happy latitudes?--It occurred to her, like a discovery

of her own, that, doing the work she was bidden, taking the food she was

given, whipped at will, and bought and sold, she was no better than one

among the cattle of the place;--the sudden sense of degradation made

even her dark cheek burn. She laid a hand down on the earth, her great

Teraph, to see if it were possible it could still be warm and such a

wrong done to her its child. Then, all at once, she understood that wood

and river were open to her fugitive feet, and if she stayed longer in

slavery, it was the fault of no one but herself.--She stood up, for some

one called her; she obeyed the call with alacrity, for she found it in

her power to do so or not as she chose. She felt taller as she stepped

along, and held up her head with the dignity of personality. She

acknowledged, perhaps, that she was no equal of Miss Emma's,--that the

creative hand, making its first essay on her, rounded its complete work

in Miss Emma; but she declared herself now no mere offshoot of the

sod,--she was a human being, a being of beating pulses and affections,

and something within her, stifled here, longing to soar and away.

It was dark before Flor had ceased her novel course of thinking, pursued

through all her little tasks,--beautiful star-lighted dark, full of

broken breezes, soft and warm, and loaded with passionate spices and

flower-breaths; she was alone again, under the shadows of the trees,

entirely surrendered to her whirling fancies. In these few hours she had

lived to the effect of years. She was neither hungry nor tired; she was

conscious of but a single thing,--her whole being seemed effervescing

into one wild longing after liberty. It was not that she could no longer

brook control and be at the beck of each; it was a natural instinct,

awakened at last in all the strength of maturity, that would not let her

breathe another breath in peace unless it were her own,--that made her

feel as though her chains were chafing into the bone,--that taught her

the unutterable vileness and loathliness of bonds,--that convicted her,

in being a slave, of being something foul upon the fair face of

creation. She sat casting about for ways of escape. It was absurd to

think she could again blunder on that secure retreat of the swamp before

being overtaken; no boats ever passed along down the foaming river; if

she were some little mole to hide and burrow in the ground till danger

were over,--but no, she would rather front fear and ruin than lose one

iota of her newly recognized identity. But there was no other path of

safety; she clutched the ground with both hands in her powerlessness; in

all the heaven and earth there seemed to be nothing to help her.

So at last Flor rose; since she could not get away, she must stay; as

for the next day's punishment, she could laugh at it,--it was not its

weight, but its wickedness, that troubled her; but escape, some time,

she would. Lying in wait for method, ambushed for opportunity, it would

go hard, if all failed. Of what value would life be then? she could but

throw that after. So at some time, that was certain, she would

go,--when, it was idle to say; it might be years before affairs were

more propitious than now,--but then, at last, one day, the place that

had known her should know her no more. Nevertheless, despite all this

will and resolution, the heart of the child had sunk like a plummet at

thought of leaving everything, at fear of future fortune; this

deferring, after all, was half like respite.

Flor drew near the out-door fire, where Zoë and one or two others busied

themselves. Something excited them extremely, it was plain to see and

hear. Flor, beyond the circle of the light, strained her ears to listen.

It was only a crumb of comfort that she obtained, but one of those

miraculous crumbs to which there are twelve baskets of fragments: the

Linkum gunboats were down at the mouth of the river. Oh! heaven a boat's

length off! A day and night's drifting and rowing; then climbing the

side slaves, treading the deck freemen,--the shackles fallen, the hands

loosened, the soul saved!

But the boat? There was not such a thing along these banks. Improvise

one. That was not possible. Flor listened, and the wild gasps of hope

died out again into the dulness of despair. Some other time,--not this.

As she stood still, idly and hopelessly hearkening to the mutter of the

old women, with the patches of flickering fire-light falling on their

faces in strange play and revelation, there stole upon her ear a sweeter

and distincter sound, the voice of Miss Agatha, as, leaning out upon the

night, she sang a plaint that consorted with her melancholy mood,

learned in her Northern home in happier hours, without a thought of the

moment of misery that might make it real.

Sooner or later the storms shall beat

Over my slumber from head to feet;

Sooner or later the winds shall rave

In the long grass above my grave.

I shall not heed them where I lie,

Nothing their sound shall signify,

Nothing the headstone's fret of rain,

Nothing to me the dark day's pain.

Sooner or later the sun shall shine

With tender warmth on that mound of mine;

Sooner or later, in summer air,

Clover and violet blossom there.

I shall not feel in that deep-laid rest

The sheeted light fall over my breast,

Nor ever note in those hidden hours

The wind-blown breath of the tossing flowers.

Sooner or later the stainless snows

Shall add their hush to my mute repose;

Sooner or later shall slant and shift

And heap my bed with their dazzling drift.

Chill though that frozen pall shall seem,

Its touch no colder can make the dream

That recks not the sweet and sacred dread

Shrouding the city of the dead.

Sooner or later the bee shall come

And fill the noon with his golden hum;

Sooner or later on half-paused wing

The blue-bird's warble about me ring,--

Ring and chirrup and whistle with glee,

Nothing his music means to me,

None of these beautiful things shall know

How soundly their lover sleeps below.

Sooner or later, far out in the night,

The stars shall over me wing their flight;

Sooner or later my darkling dews

Catch the white spark in their silent ooze.

Never a ray shall part the gloom

That wraps me round in the kindly tomb;

Peace shall be perfect for lip and brow

Sooner or later,--oh, why not now!

Little of this wobegone song touched Flor even enough to let her know

there was some one in the world more wretched than herself. The last

word, the last phrase, rang in her ears like a command,--now, why not

now?--waiting for times and chances, hesitating, delaying, since go she

must,--then why not now? What more did she need than a board and two

sticks? Here they were in plenty. And with that, a bright thought, a

fortunate memory,--the old abandoned scow! And if, after all, she

failed, and went to watery death, did not the singer tell in how little

time all would be quiet and oblivious once again? Oh, why not now?

Perhaps Flor would never have been entirely subjected to this state of

mind but for an injury that she had suffered. Miss Emma had been

rendered ill by the night's exposure in the swamp. In consequence of her

complicity in this crime, Flor had been excluded from her young

mistress's room during her indisposition, and ever since had not only

been deprived of her companionship, but had not even been allowed to

look upon her from a distance. A single week of that made life a desert.

Too proud to complain, Flor saw in this the future, and so recognized,

it may be, that it would be easy to part from the place, having already

parted with Miss Emma. She drew nearer to the group now, and stood there

long, while they wondered at her, gazing into the fire, her head fallen

upon her breast. There was only one thing more to do: her little

squirrel; nothing but her front of battle had kept it safe this many a

day; were she once gone, it would be at the mercy of the first gridiron.

Nobody saw the tears, in the dark and the distance, fast falling over

the tiny sacrifice; but the cook might have guessed at them, when Flor

brought her last offering, and begged that it might be prepared and

taken in to Miss Emma.

How many things there were to do that evening! One wanted water, and

another wanted towels, and a third wanted everything there was to want.

Last of all, little Pluto came running with his unkindled torch,--Mas'r

Henry wanted dancing.

Flor rummaged for her castanets, her tambourine, her ankle-rings,--they

had all been thrown hither and thither,--and at length, as Pluto's torch

flared up, ran tinkling along the turf, into the glow; and her voice

broke, as she danced, into high, clear singing, triumphant singing, that

welled up to the very sky, and made the air echo with sweetness. As she

sang, all her slender form swayed to the tune, posturing, gesturing,

bending now, now almost soaring, while, falling in showers of twinkling

steps, her fleet feet seemed to weave their way on air. What ailed the

girl? all asked;--such a play of emotion of mingled sorrow and ecstasy,

never before had been interpreted by measure; so a disembodied spirit

might have danced, and her dusky hue, the strange glancing lights thrown

upon her here and there by the torch, going and coming and glittering at

pleasure, made her appear like a shadow disporting before them. At

length and slowly, note by note, with wild lingering turns to which the

movement languished, her tone fell from its lofty jubilance to a happy

flute-like humming; she waved her arms in the mimic tenderness of

repeated and passionate farewells; then, still humming, faint and low

and sweet, tripped off again, through the glow, along the turf, into the

shadow, and out of sight; and it seemed to the beholders as if a

fountain of gladness had gushed from the sod, and, playing in the light

a moment, had run away down to join the river and the breaking sea.

Mas'r Henry called after Flor to throw her a penny; but she failed to

reappear, and he tossed it to Pluto instead, and forgot about her.

* * * * *

So, bailed out and stuffed with marsh-grass in its crazy cracks, the old

scow was afloat, the rope was cut, and by midnight it went drifting down

the river. Waist-deep in shoal water, its appropriator had dragged it

round inside the channel's ledge of rocks, with their foam and

commotion, to the somewhat more placid flow below, and now it shot away

over the smooth, slippery surface of the stream, that gave back

reflections of the starbeams like a polished mirror.

Terrified by the course along the rapid river, the little creature

crouched in the bottom of the scow, now breathless as it sped along the

slope, now catching at the edge as in some chance eddy or flow it

swirled from side to side, or, spinning quite round, went down the other

way. But by-and-by gathering courage, she took her station, kneeling

where with the long poles, previously provided, she could best direct

her galley and avoid the dangers of a castaway. Peering this way and

that through the darkness, carried along without labor, spying countless

dangers where none existed, passing safely by them all, coming into a

strange region of the river, she began to feel the exhilaration of

venturous voyagers close upon unknown shores; the rush of the river and

the rustle of the forest were all the sounds she heard; she was speeding

alone through the darks of space to find another world. But, with time,

a more material sensation called her back,--her feet were wet. What if

the scow should founder! She flew to the old sun-dried gourd, and bailed

away again till her arms were tired. When she dared leave the gourd, she

was more calmly floating along and piercing an avenue of mighty gloom;

the river-banks had reared themselves two walls of stone, and over them

a hanging forest showed the heavens only like a scarf of stars caught

upon its tree-tops and shaking in the wind. The deep loneliness made

Flor tremble; the water that upbuoyed her was blackness itself; the way

before her was impenetrable; far up above her opened that rent of

sky,--so far, that she, a little dark waif among such tremendous

shadows, was all unguessed by any guardian eye.

But not for heaven itself bodily before her would she have turned about,

she who was all but free. The thought of that rose in her heart like

strong wings beating onward;--feverishly she followed.

Flor perceived now that the old scow was being borne along with a

strong, steady-motion, unlike its first fitful drift; it brought her

heart to her throat,--for just so, it seemed to her, would a torrent set

that was hastening to plunge over the side of the earth. She remembered,

with a start of cold horror, Zoë's dim tradition of a fall far off in

the river. She had never seen one, but Zoë had stamped its terrors

deeply. Still down in the gloom itself she could see nothing but the

slowly lightening sky overhead, the drowning stars, the rosy flush upon

the dark old tips feathering against a dewy grayness that was like

powdered light. But gradually she heard what conquered all necessity of

seeing,--heard a continuous murmurous sound that filled all the air and

grew to be a sullen roar. It seemed like the dread murmur from the world

beyond the grave, the roar in earthly ears of that awful silence. Flor's

quick senses were not long at fault. She seized her poles, and with all

her might endeavored to push in towards the side and out of the main

channel. Straws would have availed nearly as much; far faster than she

went in shore she drove down stream. It was getting to be morning

twilight all below; a soft, damp wind was blowing in her face; in the

distance she could see, like the changing outline of a phantom, a low

cloud of mist, wavering now on this side, now on that, but forever

rising and falling and hovering before her. She knew what it was. If she

could only bring her boat to that bank,--precipice though it was,--there

must be some broken piece to catch by! She toiled with all her puny

strength, and the great stream laughed at her and roared on. Suddenly,

what her wildest efforts failed to do, the river did itself,--dividing

into twenty currents for its plunge, some one of the eddies caught the

old scow in its teeth and sent it whirling along the inmost current of

all, close upon the shore. The rock, whose cleft the river had

primevally chosen, was here more broken than above; various edges

protruded maddeningly as Flor skimmed by almost within reach. Twice she

plucked at them and missed. One flat shelf, over which the thin water

slipped like a sheet of molten glass, remained and caught her eye; she

was no longer cold or stiff with terror, but frantic to save herself; it

was the only chance, the last; shooting by, she sprang forward, pole in

hand, touched it, fell, caught a ledge with her hands while the fierce

flow of the water lifted her off her feet, scrambled up breathlessly and

was safe, while the scow swept past, two flashing furlongs, poised a few

moments after on the brink of the fall, went majestically over, and came

up to the surface below in pieces.

Flor wrung her hands in dismay. She had not understood her situation

before. There was no escape now, it seemed,--not even to return. Nothing

was possible save starving to death on this ledge,--and after that, the

vultures. She sat there for a little while in a kind of stupor. She saw

the light falling slowly down, as it had fallen millions of mornings

before, and bringing out all blue and purple shadows on the wet old

rock; she saw the current ever hurrying by to join the tumult of the

cataract; she heard the deep, sweet music of the waters like a noisy

dream in her ears. With the shock of her wreck coming at the instant

when she fancied herself so swiftly and securely speeding on towards

safety and freedom, she felt indifferent to all succeeding fate. What if

she did die? who was she? what was she? nothing but an atom. What odds,

after all? The solution of her soliloquy was, that, before the first ray

of sunshine reached down and smote the dark torrent into glancing

emerald, she began to feel ravenously hungry, and found it a great deal

of odds, after all. She rose to her feet, grasping cautiously at the

slippery rock, and searched about her. There was another ledge close at

hand, corresponding to the one on which she stood; she crept forward and

transferred herself, with an infinitude of tremors, from this to that;

there was a foothold just beyond; she gained it. Up and down and all

along there were other projections, just enough for a hand, a foot: a

wet and terrible pathway; to follow it might be death, to neglect it

certainly was. What had she danced for all her days, if it had not made

her sure and nimble footed? Under her the foam leaped up, the spectral

mist crept like an icy breath, the spray sprinkled all about her,

swinging herself along from ledge to ledge, from jag to jag, like a

spider on a viewless thread. Now she hung just above the fall, looking

down and longing to leap, with nothing but a shining laurel-branch

between her and the boiling pits below; now, at last, a green hillside

sloped to the water's edge, sparkling across all its solitude with ten

thousand drops of dew, a broad, blue morning heaven bent and shone

overhead, and having raced the river in the moment's light-heartedness

of glee at her good hap, she sat some rods below, looking up at the fall

and dipping her bleeding and blistered feet in and out of the cool and

rapid-running river.

What was there now to do? To go back,--to go back,--not if she were torn

by lions! That was as impossible for her as to reverse a fiat of

creation. God had said to her,--"Let there be light." How could she,

then, return to darkness? To keep along on land,--it might be weeks

before she reached the quarter of the gunboats,--she would be seized as

a stray, and lodged in jail, and sold for whom it might concern. But

with her scow gone to pieces, what other thing was there to do? So she

sat looking up at the spurting cascades, with their horns of silver

leaping into the light, and all the clear brown and beryl rush of their

crystalline waters, and longing for her scow. If she had so much as the

bit of bark on which the squirrels crossed the river! She looked again

about her for relief. The rainbow at the foot of all the falls, in its

luminous, steady arch, seemed a bridge solid enough for even her little

black feet, had one side of the stream been any surer haven than the

other; and as she sought out its bases, her eye lighted on something

curiously like a weed swaying up and down. She picked her way to it, and

found it wedged where she could loosen it,--two planks still nailed to a

stout crossbar. She floated it, and held it fast a moment. What if she

trusted to it,--with neither sail nor rudder, as before, but now with

neither oar nor pole? On shore, for her there were only ravening wolves;

waterfalls were no worse than they, and perhaps there were no more

waterfalls. She stepped gingerly upon the fragment, seated and balanced

herself, paddled with her two hands, and thought to slip away. In spite

of everything, a kind of exultation bubbled up within her,--she felt as

if she were defying Destiny itself.

When, however, Flor intrusted herself to the stream, the stream received

the trust and seemed inclined to keep it; for there she stayed: the

planks tilted up and down, the water washed over her, but there were the

falls at nearly the same distance as when she embarked, and there they

stayed as well. The water, too, was no more fresh and sweet, but had a

salt and brackish taste. The sun was nearly overhead, and she was in an

agony of apprehension before she saw the falls slide slowly back, and in

one of a fresh succession of wonders, understanding nothing of it, she

found herself, with a strange sucking heave under her, falling on the

ebb-tide as before she had fallen on the mountain-current.

Gentle undulations of friendly hills seemed now to creep by; and through

their openings she caught glimpses of cotton-fields. There was a wicked

relish in her thoughts, as she pictured the dusky laborers at work

there, and she gliding by unseen in the idle sunshine. She passed again

between high banks of red earth, scored by land-slides, with springs

oozing out half-way up, and now and then clad in a mantle of vivid

growth and color,--a thicket of blossoming pomegranate darkening on a

sunburst of creamy dogwood, or a wild fig-tree sending its roots down to

drink, with a sweet-scented and gorgeous epiphyte weaving a flowery

enchantment about-them, and making the whole atmosphere reel with

richness. But all this verdant beauty, the lush luxuriance of

grape-vines, of dark myrtle-masses, of swinging curtains of convolvuli

almost brushing her head as she floated by,--nothing of this was new to

Flor, nothing precious; she could have given all the beauty of earth and

heaven for a crust of bread just then. She thought of the plantation

with a dry sob, but would not turn her face. She could not move much,

indeed, her position was so ticklish; hardy wretch as she was, she had

already become faint and famished: she contrived, resting her arms on

the crossbar, at last, to lay her head upon them; and thus lying,

perpetually bathed by the soft, warm dip and rise of the water, the pain

of hunger left her, and she saw the world waft by like a dream.

Slowly the evening began to fall. Flor marked the bright waters dim and

put on a bloomy purple along which rosy and golden shadows wandered and

mingled, stars looked timidly up from beneath her, and just over her

shoulder, as if all the daylight left had gathered in that one little

curved line, lay the suspicion of the tenderest new moon, like some

boatman of the skies essaying to encourage her with his apparition as he

floated lightly down the west. Flor paid heed to the spectacle in its

splendid quiet but briefly; her eyes were fixed on a great trail of

passion-flowers that blew out a gale of sweetness from their broad blue

disks. She had reached that hanging branch, lavishly blossoming here on

the wilderness, and had hung upon the tide beneath it for a while, till

she found herself gently moving back again; and now she swung slightly

to and fro, neither making nor losing headway, and, fond of such

sensuous delights, half content to lie thus and do nothing but breathe

the delicious odor stealing towards her, and resting in broad airy

swaths, it seemed, upon the bosom of the stream around her. By-and-by,

when the great blue star, that last night at the zenith seemed to

suspend all the tented drapery of the sky, hung there large and lovely

again, Flor, gazing up at it with a confused sense of passion-flowers in

heaven, half woke to find herself sliding down stream at last in

earnest. Her brain was very light and giddy; all her powers of

perception were momentarily heightened; she took notice of her seesawing

upon the ebb and flow, and understood that washing up and down the

shores, a mere piece of driftwood, life would long have left her ere she

attained the river's mouth, if she were not stranded by the way. The

branch of a cedar-tree came dallying by with that, brought down from

above the falls; she half rose, and caught at it, and fell back, but she

kept hold of it by just a twig, and, fatigued with the exertion, drowsed

away awhile. Waking again, after a little, her fingers still fast upon

it, she drew it over, fixed it upright as she could, and spread her

petticoat about it at the risk of utter capsize. The soft sweet wind

beat against the sail as happily as if it had been Cleopatra's weft of

purple silk, and carried her on, while she lay back, one arm around her

jury-mast, and half indifferently unconscious again. She had meant, on

reaching the gunboats,--ah, inconceivable bliss!--to win her way with

her feet; with willowy graces and eloquent pantomime, to have danced

along the deck and into favor trippingly: now, if she should have

strength enough left to fall on her knees, it would be strange. She

clung to the crossbar in a little while from blind habit; the rest of

her body seemed light and powerless. She was neither asleep nor awake

now, suffering nothing save occasionally a wild flutter of hope which

was joy and anguish together; but all things began mingling in her mind

in a species of delirium while she gave them attention, afterwards slid

by blank of all meaning but beauty. The lofty cypresses on the edge

above loomed into obelisks, and stood like shafts of ebony against a

glow of sunrise that stirred down deep in the night; dew-clouds, it

seemed, hung on them, and lifted and lowered when their veils of moss

waved here and there; the glistering laurel-leaves shivered in a network

of light and shade like imprisoned spirits troubling to be free; but

where the great magnolias stood were massed the white wings of angels

fanning forth fragrances untold and heavenly, and one by one slowly

revealing themselves in the dawn of another day. It seemed as if great

and awful spirits must be leading this little being into light and

freedom.

So the river lapsed along, and the sun blazed, and a torture of thirst

came and went as it had come and gone before; and sometimes swiftly,

sometimes slowly, the veering winds and the pendulous tides carried the

wreck and its burden along. Flor had planned, before she started, that

all her progress should be made by night; by day she would haul up among

the tall rushes or under the lee of some stump or rock, and so escape

strange sail and spying eyes. But there had been no need of this, for no

other boat had passed up or down the river since she sailed. If there

had, she could no more have feared it. She stole by a high deserted

garden, the paling broken half away. A tardy almond-tree was stirring

its tower of bloom in the sunshine up there; oranges were reddening on

an overhanging bough, whose wreaths of snowy sweetness made the air a

passionate delight; a luscious fruit dropped, with all its royal gloss,

into the river beside her, and she could not put out a hand to catch it.

She saw now all that passed, but no longer with any afterthoughts of

reference to herself; so sights might slip across the retina of a dead

man's eye; her identity seemed fading from her, as from some substance

on the point of dissolution into the wide universe. She felt like one

who, under an æsthetic influence, seems to himself careering through

mid-air, conscious only of motion and vanishing forms. Cultured uplands

and thick woods peopled with melodies all stole by, mere picture; the

long snake of the river crept through green meadowy shores haunted by

the cluck and clutter of the marsh-hen; from a bluff of the bank broke a

blaze of fire and a yelping roar, and something slapped and skipped

along the water,--a ball from a Rebel battery to bring the strange craft

to,--others followed and danced like demons through the hissing tide

that rocked under her and plunged up and down, tilting and turning and

half drowning the wreck. Flor looked at them all with wide eyes, at the

battery and at the bluff, and went by without any more sensation than

that dazed quiet in which, at the time, she would have gone down to

death with the soft waters laying their warm weight on her head, not

even thanking Fortune that in giving her a slippery plank gave her

something to elude either canister or catapult. Occasionally she felt a

pain, a strange parched pain; it burned awhile, and left her once more

oblivious. She slept a little, by fits and starts; sometimes the very

stillness stirred her. She listened and heard the turtle plumping down

into the stream, now and then the little fishes leaping and plashing,

the eels slipping in and out among the reeds and sedges at the side; far

away in the broad marshes, that, bathed in dim vapor, now lay all about

her, the cry of a bittern boomed; she saw a pair of herons flapping

inland over the gray swell of the water; there were some great purple

phantoms, darkly imagined monsters; looming near at hand:--all the

phantasmagoria drifted by,--and then, caught in the currents playing

forever by noon or night round the low edges of sand-bars and islets,

she was sweeping out to sea like chaff.

The sun was going down, a mere redness in the curdling fleecy haze; the

weltering seas rose and fell in broad sheets of burnished silver, the

monotone of their music followed them, a cool salt wind blew over them

and freshened them for storm. Flor rose on her arm and looked back,--the

breeze roused her; pain and fear and hope rose with her and looked back

too. Eager, feverish, fierce, recollecting and desiring and imprecating,

her dry lips parted for a shriek that the dryer throat had at first no

power to utter. In such wild longing pangs it seemed her heart would

burst as it beat. The low land, the great gunboats, all were receding,

and she was washing out to sea, a weed.--Well, then, wash!

* * * * *

The stem of the boat rose lightly, riding over the rollers; the sturdy

arms kept flashing stroke; the great gulfs gaped for a life, no matter

whose; night would darken down on them soon;--pull with a will!

They heard her voice as they drew near: she had found it again, singing,

as the swan sings his death-song, loud and clear,--singing to herself

some song of her old happy dancing-days, while the spray powdered over

her and one broad wave lifted and tossed her on to the next,--no note of

sorrow in the song, and no regret.

It was but brief delay beside her; then they pulled back, the wind

piping behind them,--nearer to that purple cloud with its black plume of

smoke, up the side and over; all the white faces crowding round her,

pallid blots; one dark face smiling on her like Sarp's; friendship and

succor everywhere about her; and over her, blowing out broadly upon the

stormy wind, that flag whose starry shadow nowhere shelters a slave.