wer tier being
supported by brick pillars.

But the place looked desolate and uncomfortable; some windows stopped up
with boards, some with shattered panes, and shutters hanging by a single
hinge,--all telling of coarse neglect and discomfort.

Bits of board, straw, old decayed barrels and boxes, garnished the
ground in all directions; and three or four ferocious-looking dogs,
roused by the sound of the wagon-wheels, came tearing out, and were with
difficulty restrained from laying hold of Tom and his companions, by the
effort of the ragged servants who came after them.

"Ye see what ye'd get!" said Legree, caressing the dogs with grim
satisfaction, and turning to Tom and his companions. "Ye see what ye'd
get, if ye try to run off. These yer dogs has been raised to track
niggers; and they'd jest as soon chaw one on ye up as eat their supper.
So, mind yerself! How now, Sambo!" he said, to a ragged fellow, without
any brim to his hat, who was officious in his attentions. "How have
things been going?"

"Fust rate, Mas'r."

"Quimbo," said Legree to another, who was making zealous demonstrations
to attract his attention, "ye minded what I telled ye?"

"Guess I did, didn't I?"

These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation.
Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically
as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty,
brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities. It is
a common remark, and one that is thought to militate strongly against
the character of the race, that the negro overseer is always more
tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the
negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white. It is no
more true of this race than of every oppressed race, the world over. The
slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be one.

Legree, like some potentates we read of in history, governed his
plantation by a sort of resolution of forces. Sambo and Quimbo cordially
hated each other; the plantation hands, one and all, cordially hated
them; and, by playing off one against another, he was pretty sure,
through one or the other of the three parties, to get informed of
whatever was on foot in the place.

Nobody can live entirely without social intercourse; and Legree
encouraged his two black satellites to a kind of coarse familiarity with
him,--a familiarity, however, at any moment liable t