ly.

"Have you never been married?"

"Yes, Mossa."

"Is your wife dead?"

"I hope so,--to de good God, I hope so, Mossa!"

Sol leaned forward on his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed
his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an
epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on
me a face stern as Cato's,--

"Nebber, _nebber_, NEBBER, shall I see wife or chil' agin!"

I then said openly that I was an Abolitionist,--that I believed in every
man's right to freedom,--and that, as to the safest friend in the world,
he might tell me his story,--which he thereupon did, and which was
afterward abundantly corroborated by pro-slavery testimony on shore.

"Mossa Cutter" had fallen heir in South Carolina to a good plantation
and thirty likely "niggers." At the age of twenty-five he sold out the
former and emigrated to Florida with the latter. The price of the
plantation rapidly disappeared at horse-races, poker-parties,
cock-fights, and rum-shops. If Mossa Cutter speculated, he was always
unsuccessful, because he was always hotheaded and always drunk.

In process of time "debts of honor" and the sheriff's hammer had
dissipated his entire clientage of blacks, with the exception of Sol, a
pretty yellow woman with a nice baby, who were respectively Sol's wife
and child, and a handsome quadroon boy of seventeen, who was Mossa
Cutter's body-servant.

Sol came to the quarters one night and found his wife and child gone.
They were on their way to Tallahassee in a coffle which had been made up
as a sudden speculation on the cheerful Bourse of Jacksonville. Four
doors away Mossa Cutter could be seen between the flaunting red curtains
of a bar-room window, drinking Sol's heart's blood at sixpence the
tumblerful.

Sol, I hear they are going to put an English musket in your hands!

Sol fell paralyzed to the ground. A moment after, he was up on his feet
again, and, without thought of nine o'clock, pass, patrol, or
whipping-house, rushing on the road likely to be taken by chain-gangs to
Tallahassee. He reached the "Piny Woods" timber on the outskirts of the
town. No one had noticed him, and he struck madly through the sand that
floors those forests, knowing no weariness, for his heart-strings pulled
that way. He travelled all night without overtaking them; but just as
the first gray dawn glimmered between the piny plumes behind him, he
heard the coarse shout of drivers clos