es?"

"Yer they is. It's my wife an' me, gwyn to nurse a lady in Delaware."

"Let me see!" He puffed his cigar upon the paper, and exclaimed, "Prissy
Hudson? why, my skin! that's my wife's nurse. And that ain't the same
woman! where did you get this pass?"

"Go on, Sorden!" coughed the other man, "I'm bleeding. Let me lie down."

His eyes had lost their wanton fire, and were hollow and glazing. The
driver caught him in his arms, and uttered the kind words,

"I love him as I never loved A male!"

"Give me back the passes!" exclaimed the mulatto man, as the wagon
started south.

"No," shouted the driver, "I shall keep them as evidence against Prissy
Hudson for assisting a runaway!"

"Lost! lost!" muttered the mulatto. "Now, darling, the swamp's our only
road!"

He seized her in his flight, and pulled her up the cart-track along the
swampy branch.

"What have you done?" cried Virgie.

"Come! come!" answered the man. "Here is no place to talk."

With fever making her strong, and heightening, yet clouding, her
impressions, so that time seemed extinct, and fear itself absorbed in
frenzy, the girl followed the man into the deep sand of the track, and
scarcely noted the melancholy cypress-trees rising around them out of
pools that sucked poison from the starlight, basking there beside the
reptile.

Flowers, with such rich tints that night scarcely darkened them, sent up
their musky perfumes, and vines, in silent festoons, drooped from high
tips of giant trees like Babel's aspiring builders, turned back and
stricken dumb. They fell all limp, and, hanging there in death, their
beards still seemed to grow in the ghastly vitality of an immortal
dream.

The sounds of restless animation, intenser in the night, as if the moon
were mistress here, and wakened every insect brain and tongue to
industry, grew prodigious in the sick girl's ears, and seemed to deaden
every word her male companion had to say, and, like enormous pendulums
of sound, the roaming crickets and amphibia swung to and fro their
contradictions, like viragos doomed to wait for eternity, and each
insist upon the last word to say:

"You did!" "You didn't!" "You did!" "You didn't, you didn't, you
didn't!" "You did, you did!"

Thus the eternal quarrel, begun before Hector and the Greeks were born,
had raged in the Cypress Swamp, and increased in loudness every night,
till on the flying slave girl's ears it pealed like God and Satan
disputing for her s