d Polverel. "You wish to speak to
the people, General Toussaint."

"No," said Toussaint.

"What then?" inquired Laveaux.

"I would be alone," said Toussaint, stepping backwards from the table.

"Your fatigues have doubtless been great," observed Laveaux. "Lights
shall be ordered in your apartment."

"I cannot sleep yet," said Toussaint. "I cannot sleep till I have news
from Breda. But I have need of thought, gentlemen; there is moonlight
and quiet in these gardens. Permit me to leave you now."

He paced the shrubberies, cool with moonlight and with dews; and his
agitation subsided when all eyes but those of Heaven were withdrawn.
Here no flatteries met his ear--no gestures of admiration made him drop
his eyes, abashed. Constrained as he yet felt himself in equal
intercourse with whites, new to his recognised freedom, unassured in his
acts, uncertain of the future, and (as he believed) unprepared for such
a future as was now unfolding, there was something inexpressibly irksome
and humbling in the homage of the whites--of men who understood nothing
of him, and little of his race, and who could have none but political
purposes in their intercourse with him. He needed this evening the
sincerities as well as the soothings of nature; and it was with a sense
of relief that he cast himself once again upon her bosom, to be
instructed, with infantine belief, how small an atom he was in the
universe of God--how low a rank he held in the hierarchy of the
ministers of the Highest.

"Yet I _am_ one," thought he, as the shout of his name and now title
reached his ear, distinct, though softened by distance. "I am an
appointed minister. It seems as if I were the one of whom I myself have
spoken as likely to arise--not, as Laveaux says, after Raynal, to
avenge, but to repair the wrongs of my colour. Low, indeed, are we
sunk, deep is our ignorance, abject are our wills, if such a one as I am
to be the leader of thousands--I, whose will is yet unexercised--I, who
shrink ashamed before the knowledge of the meanest white--I, so lately a
slave--so long dependent that I am an oppression to myself--am at this
hour the ruler over ten thousand wills! The ways of God are dark, or it
might seem that He despised His negro children in committing so many of
them to so poor a guide. But He despises nothing that He has made. It
may be that we are too weak and ignorant to be fit for better guidance
in our new state of rights and duti