spectable garments.
By the appearance of her face, she might have been between thirty-five
and forty; and it was a face that, once seen, could never be
forgotten,--one of those that, at a glance, seem to convey to us an idea
of a wild, painful, and romantic history. Her forehead was high, and
her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straight, well-formed
nose, her finely-cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head and
neck, showed that she must once have been beautiful; but her face was
deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance.
Her complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features
sharp, and her whole form emaciated. But her eye was the most remarkable
feature,--so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long lashes of
equal darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There was a fierce
pride and defiance in every line of her face, in every curve of the
flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her eye was a deep,
settled night of anguish,--an expression so hopeless and unchanging as
to contrast fearfully with the scorn and pride expressed by her whole
demeanor.

Where she came from, or who she was, Tom did not know. The first he did
know, she was walking by his side, erect and proud, in the dim gray
of the dawn. To the gang, however, she was known; for there was much
looking and turning of heads, and a smothered yet apparent exultation
among the miserable, ragged, half-starved creatures by whom she was
surrounded.

"Got to come to it, at last,--grad of it!" said one.

"He! he! he!" said another; "you'll know how good it is, Misse!"

"We'll see her work!"

"Wonder if she'll get a cutting up, at night, like the rest of us!"

"I'd be glad to see her down for a flogging, I'll bound!" said another.

The woman took no notice of these taunts, but walked on, with the same
expression of angry scorn, as if she heard nothing. Tom had always lived
among refined, and cultivated people, and he felt intuitively, from her
air and bearing, that she belonged to that class; but how or why she
could be fallen to those degrading circumstances, he could not tell. The
women neither looked at him nor spoke to him, though, all the way to the
field, she kept close at his side.

Tom was soon busy at his work; but, as the woman was at no great
distance from him, he often glanced an eye to her, at her work. He saw,
at a glance, that a native adroitness and handiness m