and, beholding her master,
  Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife’s than another’s,
  Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension
  Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler,
  Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning. 
  Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were;
  Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,
  With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor
  All through her frame:  I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so. 
  ‘Say! is it so?’ she cried.  On the weak, white lips of her master
  Died a sickly smile, and he said,—­’Louise, I have sold you.’ 
  God is my judge!  May I never see such a look of despairing,
  Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master,
  Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her,
  Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman,
  Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas! 
  Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the dying,
  Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild incoherence,
  Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered:—­
  ’Sold me? sold me? sold——­And you promised to give me my freedom!—­
  Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis! 
  What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in Saint Louis? 
  What will you say to our God?—­Ah, you have been joking!  I see it!—­
  No?  God!  God!  He shall hear it,—­and all of the angels in heaven,—­
  Even the devils in hell!—­and none will believe when they hear it! 
  Sold me!’—­Fell her voice with a thrilling wail, and in silence
  Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her fingers.”

IV.

  In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened
  To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island,
  Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the waters,—­
  Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current. 
  Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle,
  Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island,
  Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor,
  Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at midnight;
  Then were at peace once more, and we heard the harsh cries of the
     peacocks
  Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed settler’s
  White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed them,
  Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their laughter. 
  Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon
  Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.

  V.