proper stamps upon the envelope, the
round robin was mailed to Roger Vanderwater. And Roger Vanderwater did
nothing, save to turn the round robin over to the two overseers. Clancy
and Munster were angered. They turned the guards loose at night on the
slave pen. The guards were armed with pick handles. It is said that next
day only half of the slaves were able to work in Hell's Bottom. They
were well beaten. The slave who could write was so badly beaten that he
lived only three months. But before he died, he wrote once more, to what
purpose you shall hear.

Four or five weeks afterward, Tom Dixon, a slave, had his arm torn off
by a belt in Hell's Bottom. His fellow-workmen, as usual, made a grant
to him from the fund, and Clancy and Munster, as usual, refused to pay
it over from the fund. The slave who could write, and who even then was
dying, wrote anew a recital of their grievances. And this document was
thrust into the hand of the arm that had been torn from Tom Dixon's
body.

Now it chanced that Roger Vanderwater was lying ill in his palace at the
other end of Kingsbury--not the dire illness that strikes down you and
me, brothers; just a bit of biliousness, mayhap, or no more than a bad
headache because he had eaten too heartily or drunk too deeply. But it
was enough for him, being tender and soft from careful rearing. Such
men, packed in cotton wool all their lives, are exceeding tender and
soft. Believe me, brothers, Roger Vanderwater felt as badly with his
aching head, or THOUGHT he felt as badly, as Tom Dixon really felt with
his arm torn out by the roots.

It happened that Roger Vanderwater was fond of scientific farming, and
that on his farm, three miles outside of Kingsbury, he had managed to
grow a new kind of strawberry. He was very proud of that new strawberry
of his, and he would have been out to see and pick the first ripe ones,
had it not been for his illness. Because of his illness he had ordered
the old farm slave to bring in personally the first box of the berries.
All this was learned from the gossip of a palace scullion, who slept
each night in the slave pen. The overseer of the plantation should have
brought in the berries, but he was on his back with a broken leg from
trying to break a colt. The scullion brought the word in the night, and
it was known that next day the berries would come in. And the men in the
slave pen of Hell's Bottom, being men and not cowards, held a council.

The slave wh