e and silence, as if a spirit hummed the tune,
and forgot his doom of slavery a moment in the deeper anguish of a
treacherous heart that simple hymn bestirred. It was only Jimmy
Phoebus, thinking what he could say to punish this double traitor
most, who had turned his back upon his race and upon gratitude, and
Jimmy had remembered the poor woman chained to the tree on Twiford's
island, and her oft-reiterated hymn; and the conclusion was flashed upon
his mind that the mulatto wretch who decoyed her away and sold her was
none other than his renegade fellow-prisoner, in turn made merchandise
of because too dangerous to set at large in the probable hue-and-cry for
her.

"Poor Mary!" Phoebus slowly spoke, in his deepest tones, with solemn
cadence.

The wretched man listened and trembled.

"Mary's sperrit's callin' 'Zeke!'" Phoebus continued, awful in his
inflection.

The miserable procurer's heart stopped at the words, and his eyeballs
turned in torment.

"Come, Zeke! poor Mary's a-waitin' for ye!" cried the sailor, suddenly,
in a voice of thunder, and as suddenly relapsed into the low singing of
the quiet hymn again:

"Deep-en de woun' dy hands have made
In dis weak, helpless soul,
Till mercy, wid its mighty aid
De-scen to make me whole;
Yes, Lord!
De-scen to make me whole."

The elegant Iscariot, at the thunder of the invocation, had reached into
a place between two of the cypress shingles in the roof, where he had
hidden the sailor's knife, the blade being pressed out of sight, and
only the handle within his grasp. It had been overlooked in the exciting
scenes of the previous few minutes, and now recurred to his mind, as
superstitious passions rolled like dreadful meteors across the black and
hopeless chasm of his despairing soul.

When the low drone of the hymn he had heard his victim sing to her baby,
when her faith in him was pure and childlike, crossed his maddened ears
again, he raised one shriek of "Mercy!" to which no answer fell, and
drew the blade across his throat and fell dead in the kidnappers' den.

CHAPTER XXVI.

VAN DORN.

A thin fur of frost was on the level farm-lands, and the saffron and
orange leaves were falling almost audibly from the trees, as Levin
Dennis awoke on Wednesday, in the long, low house standing back in the
fields from Johnson's cross-roads, and drank in the cool, stimulating
morn, the sun already having made his first relay, and his pos