ade the task to
her an easier one than it proved to many. She picked very fast and very
clean, and with an air of scorn, as if she despised both the work and
the disgrace and humiliation of the circumstances in which she was
placed.

In the course of the day, Tom was working near the mulatto woman who
had been bought in the same lot with himself. She was evidently in a
condition of great suffering, and Tom often heard her praying, as she
wavered and trembled, and seemed about to fall down. Tom silently as he
came near to her, transferred several handfuls of cotton from his own
sack to hers.

"O, don't, don't!" said the woman, looking surprised; "it'll get you
into trouble."

Just then Sambo came up. He seemed to have a special spite against this
woman; and, flourishing his whip, said, in brutal, guttural tones, "What
dis yer, Luce,--foolin' a'" and, with the word, kicking the woman with
his heavy cowhide shoe, he struck Tom across the face with his whip.

Tom silently resumed his task; but the woman, before at the last point
of exhaustion, fainted.

"I'll bring her to!" said the driver, with a brutal grin. "I'll give her
something better than camphire!" and, taking a pin from his coat-sleeve,
he buried it to the head in her flesh. The woman groaned, and half rose.
"Get up, you beast, and work, will yer, or I'll show yer a trick more!"

The woman seemed stimulated, for a few moments, to an unnatural
strength, and worked with desperate eagerness.

"See that you keep to dat ar," said the man, "or yer'll wish yer's dead
tonight, I reckin!"

"That I do now!" Tom heard her say; and again he heard her say, "O,
Lord, how long! O, Lord, why don't you help us?"

At the risk of all that he might suffer, Tom came forward again, and put
all the cotton in his sack into the woman's.

"O, you mustn't! you donno what they'll do to ye!" said the woman.

"I can bar it!" said Tom, "better 'n you;" and he was at his place
again. It passed in a moment.

Suddenly, the stranger woman whom we have described, and who had, in the
course of her work, come near enough to hear Tom's last words, raised
her heavy black eyes, and fixed them, for a second, on him; then, taking
a quantity of cotton from her basket, she placed it in his.

"You know nothing about this place," she said, "or you wouldn't have
done that. When you've been here a month, you'll be done helping
anybody; you'll find it hard enough to take care of your own skin!"