After death his eyes remained open.  To press the lids down, silver dollars were laid on them.  These were buried with him.  From this circumstance, a rumor went abroad that his coffin was filled with money.  Three times his grave was opened, and his coffin taken out.  The last time, his body was found on the ground, and a flock of buzzards were pecking at it.  He was again interred, and a sentinel set over his grave.  The perpetrators were never discovered.

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.  Mr. Conant, a neighbor of Mr. Litch, returned from town one evening in a partial state of intoxication.  His body servant gave him some offence.  He was divested of his clothes, except his shirt, whipped, and tied to a large tree in front of the house.  It was a stormy night in winter.  The wind blew bitterly cold, and the boughs of the old tree crackled under falling sleet.  A member of the family, fearing he would freeze to death, begged that he might be taken down; but the master would not relent.  He remained there three hours; and, when he was cut down, he was more dead than alive.  Another slave, who stole a pig from this master, to appease his hunger, was terribly flogged.  In desperation, he tried to run away.  But at the end of two miles, he was so faint with loss of blood, he thought he was dying.  He had a wife, and he longed to see her once more.  Too sick to walk, he crept back that long distance on his hands and knees.  When he reached his master’s, it was night.  He had not strength to rise and open the gate.  He moaned, and tried to call for help.  I had a friend living in the same family.  At last his cry reached her.  She went out and found the prostrate man at the gate.  She ran back to the house for assistance, and two men returned with her.  They carried him in, and laid him on the floor.  The back of his shirt was one clot of blood.  By means of lard, my friend loosened it from the raw flesh.  She bandaged him, gave him cool drink, and left him to rest.  The master said he deserved a hundred more lashes.  When his own labor was stolen from him, he had stolen food to appease his hunger.  This was his crime.

Another neighbor was a Mrs. Wade.  At no hour of the day was there cessation of the lash on her premises.  Her labors began with the dawn, and did not cease till long after nightfall.  The barn was her particular place of torture.  There she lashed the slaves with the might of a man.  An old slave of hers once said to me, “It is hell in missis’s house.  ’Pears I can never get out.  Day and night I prays to die.”

The mistress died before the old woman, and, when dying, entreated her husband not to permit any one of her slaves to look on her after death.  A slave who had nursed her children, and had still a child in her care, watched her chance, and stole with it in her arms to the room where lay her dead mistress.  She gazed a while on her, then raised her hand and dealt two blows on her face, saying, as she did so,