literally panic-stricken, and nothing but
flight could satisfy my instinct, my impulse of self-preservation. I
must go, even if blown like a leaf before the gales of heaven; must fly,
if even to certainty of destruction. I had felt this necessity once
before, be it remembered, but never so stringently, so morbidly as now.
I was yielding under the agony, the anxiety incident to my condition; my
nervous system, too severely taxed, was breaking down, and it would
succumb entirely, unless relief came to me (of this I felt convinced),
before another weary month should roll away. Had I been imprisoned for a
certain term of years as an expiation for crimes, I think I could have
borne it better; but the injustice, the uncertainty of these proceedings
were more than I could sustain.

I fell asleep, I remember, on the night of my interview with
Gregory--_alias_ Englehart--to dream confusedly of Baron Trenck and his
iron collar, and the Princess Amelia and her unmitigated grief, and it
seemed to me that I was given to drink from a cup the poor prisoner had
carved (as memoirs tell us he carved and sold many such), filled with a
sort of bitter wine, by the man in the iron mask--so vividly did Fancy,
mixing her ingredients, typify the anguish of my waking moments, and
reproduce its anxieties, in dreams of night that could not be
controlled.

When I awoke in the morning it was to lie quietly, and listen to the
doleful voice of Sabra, for such had been Dinah's Congo name, uplifted
in what she called a "speritual" as she cleaned the brass mountings of
the grate and kindled its tardy fires. With very slight alteration and
adjustment, this picturesque and dramatic Obi hymn is given in this
place, just as I jotted it down in my diary, thus imprinting it on my
memory from her own dolphin-like lips and bellows-like lungs. Her
forefathers, she informed me with considerable pride, had been
snake-worshipers, and she certainly inherited their tendency to treat
the worst enemy of mankind with respectful adoration.

It served to divert my mind from its one fixed idea for a little time to
arrange this singular hymn, which, together with those she had given
voice to on the raft, proved her poetic powers. For Sabra assured me
that this gift of sacred song had come to her one day when she was
washing her master's linen, and that she had felt it run cold streaks
down her back and through her brain, and that from that time she was
uplifted to sing "s