tearing it
off, and throwing it into the charcoal. "What did you bring it to me
for?"

Sambo stood, with his heavy mouth wide open, and aghast with wonder; and
Cassy, who was preparing to leave the apartment, stopped, and looked at
him in perfect amazement.

"Don't you bring me any more of your devilish things!" said he, shaking
his fist at Sambo, who retreated hastily towards the door; and, picking
up the silver dollar, he sent it smashing through the window-pane, out
into the darkness.

Sambo was glad to make his escape. When he was gone, Legree seemed a
little ashamed of his fit of alarm. He sat doggedly down in his chair,
and began sullenly sipping his tumbler of punch.

Cassy prepared herself for going out, unobserved by him; and slipped
away to minister to poor Tom, as we have already related.

And what was the matter with Legree? and what was there in a simple
curl of fair hair to appall that brutal man, familiar with every form
of cruelty? To answer this, we must carry the reader backward in his
history. Hard and reprobate as the godless man seemed now, there had
been a time when he had been rocked on the bosom of a mother,--cradled
with prayers and pious hymns,--his now seared brow bedewed with the
waters of holy baptism. In early childhood, a fair-haired woman had led
him, at the sound of Sabbath bell, to worship and to pray. Far in New
England that mother had trained her only son, with long, unwearied love,
and patient prayers. Born of a hard-tempered sire, on whom that gentle
woman had wasted a world of unvalued love, Legree had followed in the
steps of his father. Boisterous, unruly, and tyrannical, he despised all
her counsel, and would none of her reproof; and, at an early age, broke
from her, to seek his fortunes at sea. He never came home but once,
after; and then, his mother, with the yearning of a heart that must love
something, and has nothing else to love, clung to him, and sought, with
passionate prayers and entreaties, to win him from a life of sin, to his
soul's eternal good.

That was Legree's day of grace; then good angels called him; then he
was almost persuaded, and mercy held him by the hand. His heart inly
relented,--there was a conflict,--but sin got the victory, and he
set all the force of his rough nature against the conviction of his
conscience. He drank and swore,--was wilder and more brutal than ever.
And, one night, when his mother, in the last agony of her despair, knelt
at