taken their places on the deck, and they too are
standing on the levee alone.

[Illustration: HASTY'S GRIEF.]

"Come, come, quit your parleying. Don't you see they are hauling in the
plank! Jump aboard, Mark, and don't look so glum. I'll git you another
gal down in Arkansas," said the trader.

Had he seen the look which Hasty cast upon him, he might have been
admonished by those words of Oriental piety; "Beware of the groans of a
wounded soul. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart, for a solitary
sigh has the power to overturn a world."

She turned from the trader, and, with a sob, as though the heart springs
were snapped, she threw herself into her husband's arms. Again, and
again he pressed her to his heart, then gently unclasping her hands, he
tottered along the plank, and nearly had he ended his saddened life in
the rolling stream below, but the ready hand of his owner caught him,
and hurried him aboard.

The plank was hauled aboard, and in an instant the boat was moving out
into the stream. The passengers congregated on the hurricane deck,
cheered, and waved their handkerchiefs to friends on shore, and her crew
answered the shouts of those on the other boats as she rapidly passed
them. Few saw, and those who did, without noting, the sorrowing woman,
who, leaning against a bale of goods, with one hand shading her eyes,
and the other pressed hard upon her heart, watching the receding boat,
until it turned a bend in the river, and was hidden from her sight. Yet
no watcher borne away upon the boat, nor any sorrowing one left upon the
shore, turned away, as the last traces of the loved ones faded, with a
heavier heart, or a feeling of such utter loneliness as did poor Hasty.
Despairingly, she turned toward home. No tears, no choking sobs; but
only that calm, frozen look to which tears and sobs would have been
a relief.

The light, elastic step of but a week before was gone. She stopped not
now to gaze into the gay windows, or to watch the throng of promenaders;
but, with an unsteady pace, wended her way slowly to her humble home in
the lower part of the city.

"Stop, Aunt Hasty," said a colored woman belonging to Mrs. Nelson,
"missus gave me leave to cum down here dis afternoon to go home with
you, kase she said you would take it so hard parting with your ole man."

Hasty looked up as she heard the well known voice of the kind-hearted
Sally.

"O! Sally," she said, "I'se got no home now; they has taken him