better
opportunity to assail that thing of spherical shape, which by shouts,
and scowling glances, has so long kept them aloof.

To their discomfiture, the twilight is succeeded by a magnificent moon,
whose silvery effulgence falling over the plain almost equals the light
of day. They see the head still erect, the eyes angrily glancing; while
in the nocturnal stillness that cry, proceeding from the parted lips,
affrights them as ever.

And now, that night is on, more than ever does the tableau appear
strange--more than ever unlike reality, and more nearly allied to the
spectral. For, under the moonlight, shimmering through a film that has
spread over the plain, the head seems magnified to the dimensions of the
Sphinx; while the coyotes--mere jackals of terrier size--look large as
Canadian stags!

In truth, a perplexing spectacle--full of wild, weird mystery.

Who can explain it?

CHAPTER ONE.

TWO SORTS OF SLAVE-OWNERS.

In the old slave-owning times of the United States--happily now no
more--there was much grievance to humanity; proud oppression upon the
one side, with sad suffering on the other. It may be true, that the
majority of the slave proprietors were humane men; that some of them
were even philanthropic in their way, and inclined towards giving to the
unholy institution a colour of _patriarchism_. This idea--delusive, as
intended to delude--is old as slavery itself; at the same time, modern
as Mormonism, where it has had its latest, and coarsest illustration.

Though it cannot be denied, that slavery in the States was,
comparatively, of a mild type, neither can it be questioned, that among
American masters occurred cases of lamentable harshness--even to
inhumanity. There were slave-owners who were kind, and slave-owners who
were cruel.

Not far from the town of Natchez, in the State of Mississippi, lived two
planters, whose lives illustrated the extremes of these distinct moral
types. Though their estates lay contiguous, their characters were as
opposite, as could well be conceived in the scale of manhood and
morality. Colonel Archibald Armstrong--a true Southerner of the old
Virginian aristocracy, who had entered the Mississippi Valley before the
Choctaw Indians evacuated it--was a model of the kind slave-master;
while Ephraim Darke--a Massachusetts man, who had moved thither at a
much later period--was as fair a specimen of the cruel. Coming from New
England, of the purest stock of t