t, and the gentler, the
gentlest; the merry-looking field farmer sought out the cheerful, and
the sullen backwoods settler chose the sullen. Dillaway's master was a
swarthy, beetled-browed caitiff, who had worn out his own seven years of
penalty, and had now set up tyrant for himself.

As a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, in a stagnant little clearing
of the forest, our convict toiled continually--continually--like
Caliban: all days alike; hewing at the mighty trunk and hacking up the
straggling branches; no hope--no help--no respite; and the iron of
servile tyranny entered into his very soul. Ay--ay; the culprit
convicted, when he hears in open court, with an impudent assurance, the
punishment that awaits him on those penal shores, little knows the
terrors of that sentence. Months and years--yea, haply to gray hairs and
death, slavery unmitigated--uncomforted; toil and pain; toil and sorrow;
toil, and nothing to cheer; even to the end, vain tasked toil. Old
hopes, old recollections, old feelings, violently torn up by the roots.
No familiar face in sickness, no patient nurse beside the dying bed: no
hope for earth, and no prospect of heaven: but, in its varying phases,
one gloomy glaring orb of ever-present hell.

It grew intolerable--intolerable; he was beaten, mocked, and almost a
maniac. Escape--escape! Oh, blessed thought! into the wild free woods!
there, with the birds and flowers, hill and dale, fresh air and liberty!
Oh, glad hope--mad hope! His habitual cunning came to his aid; he
schemed, he contrived, he accomplished. The jutting heads of the rivets
having been diligently rubbed away from his galling fetter by a big
stone--a toil of weeks--he one day stood unshackled, having watched his
time to be alone. An axe was in his hand, and the saved single dinner of
pea-bread. That beetled-browed task-master slumbered in the hut; that
brother convict--(why need he care for him, too? every one for himself
in this world)--that kinder, humbler, better man was digging in the
open; if he wants to escape, let him think of himself: John Dillaway has
enough to take care for. Now, then; now, unobserved, unsuspected; now is
the chance! Joy, life, and liberty! Oh, glorious prospect--for this
inland world is unexplored.

He stole away, with panting heart, and fearfully exulting eye; he
ran--ran--ran, for miles--it may have been scores of them--till
night-fall, on the soft and pleasant greensward under those high echoing
w