der the direction of stage
managers over whom he had no control. Though some unhappy predecessor in
the same cell had scribbled on the wall,

"A prison is a cannie place,
Though viewed with reprobation,
Where cheats and thieves, and scants o' grace,
Find time for cogitation,"

he did not find that he could properly cogitate or meditate, even if he
had been, which he never was, a thinker. All his thoughts were reduced
to a continued wild succession of burning images,--the mild face of his
mother, so far away, as it smiled upon him when he ran about among the
cane groves of the west; the negroes, with their "young massa" on their
tongues, jabbering their affection; his father scowling upon him as
undutiful; another, not so far away, in whose eyes--beautiful to
him--love dwelt as his worshipper, looking all endearment, only the next
moment to cast upon him the withering glance of her contempt, if not
hatred; admirers, toadies, satellites, and sycophants, all there in
groups and in succession, beslabbering him with praises, then exploding
in peals of laughter. Nor was another awanting in these saturnalia--the
form and face of her whose one word of sentence had been to him as a
doom, and who fixed that doom in his soul by her red glance of reproof.
Seemingly very indifferent objects assumed in the new lights of his
spirit gigantic and affraying features,--the sea-gull, with its torn
back, bleeding and quivering, and those diamond eyes so bright even in
its looks of agony--an object low indeed in the scale of nature, but
here elevated by some overruling power into the very heart of man's
actions and destinies, as if to show out of what humble things the
lightnings of retribution may come. Nay, these diamond eyes haunted him;
they were everywhere in these saturnalian reveries, following every
recurring image as an inevitable concomitant which he had no power to
drive away, entering into the orbits of the personages, gleaming out of
the heads of negroes, that of his father, that of his mother, even that
of his mistress, imparting to the looks and glances of the latter a
brilliancy which enhanced beauty, while it sharpened them into
poignancy. But most of all were they in some way associated with the
form of the unknown lady. She never appeared to him as the being on whom
his destiny was suspended; but, sooner or later, her own comparatively
lustreless orbs changed into those diamonds, which could fulminate scorn