h," without any order,
where the light is as darkness. Life and death to him are haunted
grounds, filled with goblin forms of vague and shadowy dread.

Legree had had the slumbering moral elements in him roused by his
encounters with Tom,--roused, only to be resisted by the determinate
force of evil; but still there was a thrill and commotion of the dark,
inner world, produced by every word, or prayer, or hymn, that reacted in
superstitious dread.

The influence of Cassy over him was of a strange and singular kind. He
was her owner, her tyrant and tormentor. She was, as he knew, wholly,
and without any possibility of help or redress, in his hands; and yet so
it is, that the most brutal man cannot live in constant association with
a strong female influence, and not be greatly controlled by it. When
he first bought her, she was, as she said, a woman delicately bred; and
then he crushed her, without scruple, beneath the foot of his brutality.
But, as time, and debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood
within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she had become in
a measure his mistress, and he alternately tyrannized over and dreaded
her.

This influence had become more harassing and decided, since partial
insanity had given a strange, weird, unsettled cast to all her words and
language.

A night or two after this, Legree was sitting in the old sitting-room,
by the side of a flickering wood fire, that threw uncertain glances
round the room. It was a stormy, windy night, such as raises whole
squadrons of nondescript noises in rickety old houses. Windows were
rattling, shutters flapping, and wind carousing, rumbling, and tumbling
down the chimney, and, every once in a while, puffing out smoke and
ashes, as if a legion of spirits were coming after them. Legree had been
casting up accounts and reading newspapers for some hours, while Cassy
sat in the corner; sullenly looking into the fire. Legree laid down his
paper, and seeing an old book lying on the table, which he had noticed
Cassy reading, the first part of the evening, took it up, and began
to turn it over. It was one of those collections of stories of bloody
murders, ghostly legends, and supernatural visitations, which, coarsely
got up and illustrated, have a strange fascination for one who once
begins to read them.

Legree poohed and pished, but read, turning page after page, till,
finally, after reading some way, he threw down the book, with an