-the latter, at all events,
being of very little use to them. He was one of the overseers, a
fierce, dark, stern man. He looked as if he was incapable of
experiencing any of the softer sympathies of our nature. He was
standing close to me while the planter was being shot, and not one of us
knew who would next be selected for execution. When the men who had
taken out the overseer seized hold of him, he turned deadly pale, and
shrieked out for mercy.

"Don't kill me! don't kill me!" he exclaimed. "I am not fit to die. I
cannot go as I am into another world. Oh, let me live! let me live! I
will toil for you; I will build your cottages; I will till your fields.
Kind Africans! hear me: if I have injured anyone, I will repay him an
hundred-fold. I'll do anything you require of me; but don't, oh, don't
kill me!"

The negro chief smiled at him scornfully, and the others who surrounded
him grinned horribly in his face. "Hi! hi! you mark my back with hot
iron," said one, gripping him by the shoulder; "you take out de mark?"

"You kill my piccaninni!" cried another in a hissing tone in his ear.
"You gib him back, eh? You make him smile in me face 'gain, eh?"

"You take away me young wife!" exclaimed another, in a hoarse voice,
looking him in the face. "Where she gone to now, eh? You give her back
good and fond as she once was--no! You repay a hundred-fold!--you undo
the harm you have done!"

"Wretched man! go meet the Judge whose laws you have outraged; go
encounter the reproachful spirits of those who, in life, you have
irretrievably injured! You are a blot on the world; you must be put out
of it. You must stand before your Almighty Judge, your God. He is a
God of mercy to those who have shown mercy. But have you shown it? No!
Still you must die!"

The latter expressions were, of course, not uttered by the negroes, but
something very similar was said; and amid the shouts and execrations of
the multitude, the wretched man was dragged out, and being shot down, a
hundred weapons were plunged in his yet warm and writhing body ere he
was thrown over the cliff to be food for the fowls of the air, which, in
spite of the firing, had already settled on the body of the planter,
once his superior, now his wretched equal.

The same scene was enacted with several others. In vain they pleaded
for life, in vain they offered rewards--large bribes, freedom to some,
the means of returning to Africa to others who had bee