re."

It was late in the evening when the weary occupants of the shanties came
flocking home,--men and women, in soiled and tattered garments, surly
and uncomfortable, and in no mood to look pleasantly on new-comers. The
small village was alive with no inviting sounds; hoarse, guttural voices
contending at the hand-mills where their morsel of hard corn was yet to
be ground into meal, to fit it for the cake that was to constitute their
only supper. From the earliest dawn of the day, they had been in the
fields, pressed to work under the driving lash of the overseers; for it
was now in the very heat and hurry of the season, and no means was left
untried to press every one up to the top of their capabilities. "True,"
says the negligent lounger; "picking cotton isn't hard work." Isn't it?
And it isn't much inconvenience, either, to have one drop of water fall
on your head; yet the worst torture of the inquisition is produced by
drop after drop, drop after drop, falling moment after moment, with
monotonous succession, on the same spot; and work, in itself not
hard, becomes so, by being pressed, hour after hour, with unvarying,
unrelenting sameness, with not even the consciousness of free-will to
take from its tediousness. Tom looked in vain among the gang, as they
poured along, for companionable faces. He saw only sullen, scowling,
imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged women, or women that were not
women,--the strong pushing away the weak,--the gross, unrestricted
animal selfishness of human beings, of whom nothing good was expected
and desired; and who, treated in every way like brutes, had sunk as
nearly to their level as it was possible for human beings to do. To a
late hour in the night the sound of the grinding was protracted; for the
mills were few in number compared with the grinders, and the weary and
feeble ones were driven back by the strong, and came on last in their
turn.

"Ho yo!" said Sambo, coming to the mulatto woman, and throwing down a
bag of corn before her; "what a cuss yo name?"

"Lucy," said the woman.

"Wal, Lucy, yo my woman now. Yo grind dis yer corn, and get _my_ supper
baked, ye har?"

"I an't your woman, and I won't be!" said the woman, with the sharp,
sudden courage of despair; "you go long!"

"I'll kick yo, then!" said Sambo, raising his foot threateningly.

"Ye may kill me, if ye choose,--the sooner the better! Wish't I was
dead!" said she.

"I say, Sambo, you go to spilin' the hand