The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 35, September, 1860

On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers,
On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the gangway.
Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master,
Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife's than another's,
Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension
Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler,
Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning.
Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were;
Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,
With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor
All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so.
'Say! is it so?' she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master
Died a sickly smile, and he said,—'Louise, I have sold you.'
God is my judge! May I never see such a look of despairing,
Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master,
Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her,
Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman,
Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas!
Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the dying,
Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild incoherence,
Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered:—
'Sold me? sold me? sold–And you promised to give me my freedom!—
Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis!
What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in Saint Louis?
What will you say to our God?—Ah, you have been joking! I see it!—
No? God! God! He shall hear it,—and all of the angels in heaven,—
Even the devils in hell!—and none will believe when they hear it!
Sold me!'—Fell her voice with a thrilling wail, and in silence
Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her fingers."

IV

In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened
To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island,
Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the waters,—
Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current.
Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle,
Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island,
Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor,
Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at midnight;
Then were at peace once more, and we heard the harsh cries of the
peacocks
Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed settler's
White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed them,
Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their laughter.
Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon
Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.

V

Still with his back to us standing, the pilot went on with his story:—
"Instantly, all the people, with looks of reproach and compassion,
Flocked round the prostrate woman. The children cried, and their mothers
Hugged them tight to their breasts; but the gambler said to the
captain,—
'Put me off there at the town that lies round the bend of the river.
Here, you! rise at once, and be ready now to go with me.'
Roughly he seized the woman's arm and strove to uplift her.
She—she seemed not to heed him, but rose like one that is dreaming,
Slid from his grasp, and fleetly mounted the steps of the gangway,
Up to the hurricane-deck, in silence, without lamentation.
Straight to the stern of the boat, where the wheel was, she ran, and
the people
Followed her fast till she turned and stood at bay for a moment,
Looking them in the face, and in the face of the gambler.
Not one to save her,—not one of all the compassionate people!
Not one to save her, of all the pitying angels in heaven!
Not one bolt of God to strike him dead there before her!
Wildly she waved him back, we waiting in silence and horror.
Over the swarthy face of the gambler a pallor of passion
Passed, like a gleam of lightning over the west in the night-time.
White, she stood, and mute, till he put forth his hand to secure her;
Then she turned and leaped,—in mid air fluttered a moment,—
Down, there, whirling, fell, like a broken-winged bird from a tree-top,
Down on the cruel wheel, that caught her, and hurled her, and
crushed her,
And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever."

VI

Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him
Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope to stop her. Then, turning,—
"This is the place where it happened," brokenly whispered the pilot.
"Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time."
Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight,
Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines,
And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.
Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward
Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.
All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows
Smote like the subtile breath of an infinite sorrow upon us.

A DAY WITH THE DEAD

"Good morning!" said the old custodian, as he stood in the door of the lodge, brushing out with his knuckles the cobwebs of sleep entangled in his eyelashes, and ventilating the apartments of his fleshly tabernacle with prolonged oscitations. "You are on hand early this time, a'n't you? You're the first live man I've seen since I got up."

So saying, he vanished, and reappearing in a moment with a huge brass key, entered the arch, unlocked the gate which closed the aperture fronting the east like the cover of a porthole, and sent it with a heavy push wide open.

Wading through the flood of sunlight which poured into the passage-way–But stop! I was about,—who knows?—in imitation of divers admired models, to tell the reader in choicest poetic diction how the City of the Dead, with its magnificent streets, shining palaces, and lofty monuments, burst upon my dazzled vision,—how I walked for half a mile along a spacious avenue, beneath an arcade of giant elms hung with wreaths of mist and vocal with singing, feathery fruit,—past marble tombs whose yards were filled with bright and fragrant flowers,– among waving grassy knolls spread with the silver nets of spiders and sparkling dew,—through vales of cool twilight and ravines of sombre dusk,—and so on for more than a page, until finally, step by step, through laboriously elegant sentences, I worked my way up to the top of a lofty hill, the view from which to be graphically described as a picture and a poem dissolved together into mingled glory and mirage, and inundating with a billowy sea of beauty the landscape below;—and then further depicting to the delighted fancy of the reader, how on one side was a most remarkable river,—such as was never heard of before, probably,—in fact, a web of water framed between the hills, its rushing warp-currents, as it rolled along, woven by smoking steam-shuttles with a woof of foam,—how, at the entrance of a bay, flocks of snowy sails, with black, shining beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming out to sea,—how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices and forest,—while beyond, green woodlands, checkered fields, groves, orchards, villages, hills, farms, and villas, all glowed in an exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;—and then, still further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a certain city, designated as the Great Metropolis,—how it resembled, perhaps, a Cyclopean type-form, with blocks of buildings for letters, domes, turrets, and towers for punctuation-points, church-spires for interrogation and exclamation marks, and squares and avenues for division-spaces between the paragraphs, set up and leaded with streets into a vast editorial page of original matter on Commerce and Manufactures, rolled every morning with the ink of toil, and printing before night an edition of results circulated to the remotest quarters of the globe. And the tall chimneys yonder were to be called—let me see—oh, the smoking cathedral-towers of the Holy Catholic Church of Labor, islanding the air with clouds of incense more grateful to the Deity than the fume of priest-swung censers. All this, and much more of a similar nature, including an eloquent address to the ocean hard by, it is possible I was about to say. But, unwilling to smother the reader beneath a mountain of rhetorical flowers,—which accident might happen, should I resolve to be "equal to the occasion,"—I shall contain myself, and state, in the way of a curt preface, in plain prose, and directly to the point, that I entered a remarkably large and populous cemetery, no matter where, very early one morning,—in fact, you have the gate-keeper's word for it that I was the first person there,—that I climbed to the summit of a high hill and enjoyed the view of a beautiful landscape, just after sunrise; and with this finally said and done, let us proceed.