e handful of straw that did not cover the
earth he was stretched on; and under his head, by way of pillow for his
dying agony, two or three rough sticks just raising his skull a few
inches from the ground. The flies were all gathering around his mouth,
and not a creature was near him. There he lay,--the worn-out slave,
whose life had been spent in unrequited labour for me and mine,--without
one physical alleviation, one Christian solace, one human sympathy, to
cheer him in his extremity,--panting out the last breath of his wretched
existence, like some forsaken, over-worked, wearied-out beast of
burthen, rotting where it falls! I bent over the poor awful human
creature in the supreme hour of his mortality; and while my eyes,
blinded with tears of unavailing pity and horror, were fixed upon him,
there was a sudden quivering of the eyelids and falling of the jaw,--and
he was free. I stood up, and remained long lost in the imagination of
the change that creature had undergone, and in the tremendous
overwhelming consciousness of the deliverance God had granted the soul
whose cast-off vesture of decay lay at my feet. How I rejoiced for
him--and how, as I turned to the wretches who were calling to me from
the inner room, whence they could see me as I stood contemplating the
piteous object, I wished they all were gone away with him, the
delivered, the freed by death from bitter bitter bondage. In the next
room, I found a miserable, decrepid, old negress, called Charity, lying
sick, and I should think near too to die; but she did not think her work
was over, much as she looked unfit for further work on earth; but with
feeble voice and beseeching hands implored me to have her work lightened
when she was sent back to it from the hospital. She is one of the oldest
slaves on the plantation, and has to walk to her field labour, and back
again at night, a distance of nearly four miles. There were an unusual
number of sick women in the room to-day; among them quite a young girl,
daughter of Boatman Quash's, with a sick baby, who has a father, though
she has no husband. Poor thing! she looks like a mere child herself. I
returned home so very sad and heart-sick that I could not rouse myself
to the effort of going up to St. Annie's with the presents I had
promised the people there. I sent M---- up in the wood wagon with them,
and remained in the house with my thoughts, which were none of the
merriest.

* * * *