around the limb of an oak, and made a noose in the other.  Jacob, Flincher’s man, swung himself off first, and expired after a long struggle.  The other, horrified by the contortions and agony of his comrade, dropped his noose, and was retaken.  When discovered, two or three days afterwards, the body of Jacob was dreadfully torn and mangled, by the buzzards, those winged hyenas and goules of the Southwest.

Among the slaves who were brought from Virginia, were two young and bright mulatto women, who were always understood throughout the plantation to have been the daughters of the elder Larrimore, by one of his slaves.  One was named Sarah and the other Hannah.  Sarah, being in a state of pregnancy, failed of executing her daily allotted task of hoeing cotton.  I was ordered to whip her, and on my remonstrating with the overseer, and representing the condition of the woman, I was told that my business was to obey orders, and that if I was told “to whip a dead nigger I must do it.”  I accordingly gave her fifty lashes.  This was on Thursday evening.  On Friday she also failed through weakness, and was compelled to lie down in the field.  That night the overseer himself whipped her.  On Saturday the wretched woman dragged herself once more to the cotton field.  In the burning sun, and in a situation which would have called forth pity in the bosom of any one save a cotton-growing overseer, she struggled to finish her task.  She failed—­nature could do no more—­and sick and despairing, she sought her cabin.  There the overseer met her and inflicted fifty more lashes upon her already lacerated back.

The next morning was the Sabbath.  It brought no joy to that suffering woman.  Instead of the tones of the church bell summoning to the house of prayer, she heard the dreadful sound of the lash falling upon the backs of her brethren and sisters in bondage.  For the voice of prayer she heard curses.  For the songs of Zion obscene and hateful blasphemies.  No bible was there with its consolations for the sick of heart.  Faint and fevered, scarred and smarting from the effects of her cruel punishment, she lay upon her pallet of moss—­dreading the coming of her relentless persecutor,—­who, in the madness of one of his periodical fits of drunkenness, was now swearing and cursing through the quarters.

Some of the poor woman’s friends on the evening before, had attempted to relieve her of the task which had been assigned her, but exhausted nature, and the selfishness induced by their own miserable situation, did not permit them to finish it and the overseer, on examination, found that the week’s work of the woman, was still deficient.  After breakfast, he ordered her to be tied up to the limb of a tree, by means of a rope fastened round her wrists, so as to leave her feet about six inches from the ground.  She begged him to let her down for she was very sick.

“Very well!” he exclaimed with a sneer and a laugh,—­“I shall bleed you then, and take out some of your Virginia blood.  You are too proud a miss for Alabama.”