she had
sunk, exhausted by fatigue, or overcome by emotion, upon the porch. Her
tone is more subdued.

"I entreat you, good Doctor, let me see Adele!--for Christ's sake, if
you be His minister, let me see her!"

"Impossible, woman, impossible!" says the Doctor, more than ever
satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous
speech. "Adaly is delirious,--fearfully excited; it would destroy her.
The only hope is in perfect quietude."

The woman releases her grasp.

"Please, Doctor, let me come to-morrow. I must see her! I will see her!"

"You shall not," said the Doctor, with solemnity,--"never, with my
permission. Go to your home, woman, and pray God to have mercy on you."

"Monster!" exclaimed she, passionately, as she shook the Doctor's arm,
still under her grasp; and murmuring other words in language the good
man did not comprehend, she slipped silently down the yard,--away into
the darkness.

DOWN THE RIVER.

She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,--if, indeed, she ever
had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,--so
black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it
is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most
dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was,
though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp
shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded
muscle in all her lithe and agile frame.

Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,--if she could have
dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With
a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with
scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing
wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot
of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding
from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine
knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for
partner.

She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running
errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of
misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,--for, though all
along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she
belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to
cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she dan