[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 away that made me a home, and I don’t keer for nothing now.”

“You mustn’t be down-hearted, Hasty,” she said, “but look right up to de Lord.  He says, Call on me in de day of trouble, and I will, hear ye; and cast your burden on me, and I will care for ye.  And sure enough dis is your time ob trouble, poor crittur.”

“Yes,” she answered, “and it has been my time of trouble ever since Mark was sold, and I has prayed to de Lord, time after time, to raise up friends to save Mark from going; but ye see how it is, Sally.”