his feet, he spurned her from him,--threw her senseless on the floor,
and, with brutal curses, fled to his ship. The next Legree heard of
his mother was, when, one night, as he was carousing among drunken
companions, a letter was put into his hand. He opened it, and a lock
of long, curling hair fell from it, and twined about his fingers. The
letter told him his mother was dead, and that, dying, she blest and
forgave him.

There is a dread, unhallowed necromancy of evil, that turns things
sweetest and holiest to phantoms of horror and affright. That pale,
loving mother,--her dying prayers, her forgiving love,--wrought in that
demoniac heart of sin only as a damning sentence, bringing with it a
fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation. Legree burned the
hair, and burned the letter; and when he saw them hissing and crackling
in the flame, inly shuddered as he thought of everlasting fires. He
tried to drink, and revel, and swear away the memory; but often, in
the deep night, whose solemn stillness arraigns the bad soul in forced
communion with herself, he had seen that pale mother rising by his
bedside, and felt the soft twining of that hair around his fingers, till
the cold sweat would roll down his face, and he would spring from his
bed in horror. Ye who have wondered to hear, in the same evangel, that
God is love, and that God is a consuming fire, see ye not how, to the
soul resolved in evil, perfect love is the most fearful torture, the
seal and sentence of the direst despair?

"Blast it!" said Legree to himself, as he sipped his liquor; "where did
he get that? If it didn't look just like--whoo! I thought I'd forgot
that. Curse me, if I think there's any such thing as forgetting
anything, any how,--hang it! I'm lonesome! I mean to call Em. She hates
me--the monkey! I don't care,--I'll _make_ her come!"

Legree stepped out into a large entry, which went up stairs, by what had
formerly been a superb winding staircase; but the passage-way was dirty
and dreary, encumbered with boxes and unsightly litter. The stairs,
uncarpeted, seemed winding up, in the gloom, to nobody knew where! The
pale moonlight streamed through a shattered fanlight over the door; the
air was unwholesome and chilly, like that of a vault.

Legree stopped at the foot of the stairs, and heard a voice singing. It
seemed strange and ghostlike in that dreary old house, perhaps because
of the already tremulous state of his nerves. Hark! what