“I am going to the party, whatever the preacher may say, and whether Captain Ambrose wills it or no.  I am under his care and protection, you see, to go to New York to my aunt, Madame Du Vert, the famous milliner, and I am to learn her trade.  Her name is Greene, so they call her Du Vert, to make out that she is French—­vert is green, in French, you see; or so they tell me.  Now, Captain Ambrose is a church-member, too, and he does not want dancing on his ship, and so he made the calkers pitch the deck—­that was to break up the ball, you know; but don’t tell any one this for the ‘land’s sake,’” drawing near to me and whispering strangely, with her forefinger raised—­“or all those proud Southern people would pitch into me—­pitch, you understand?” and she laughed merrily—­“their white satin slippers and all!”

“You must not talk so, Ada;” and I took her hand, which was burning.

“Why not?  Who are you, to prevent me?  I am as good as you any day—­or Miss Lamarque either, or any of those haughty ones—­though my father was a negro-trader.  Well, whose business was that but God’s?  If He don’t care, who need care?—­An’t I right, old mammy?” appealing to the ancient negress, who had suspended her croon to listen.

“Yes, indeed—­that you is, honey; right to upholden your own dad—­nebber min’ what he did to serbe the debble.  But you looks mighty strange, chile, outen your eyes.  Wat dat you sees ober dar—­is it a ship, gal?—­or must we—­” and her voice sank to a mutter—­“must we fall back on dis picaninny, to keep from starvation?—­”

I understood her dreadful suggestion even before the words fully left her cannibal lips, exposing her yellow fangs; from the glance of her cruel eye in the direction of the child, and the working of her long, crooked talons, rather than fingers, writhed like knotted serpents; I understood them with an instinct that made me clutch him closely to my breast, and narrowly watch his enemy from that hour until the time when my brain failed and my eyes closed in unconsciousness, and with the determination to plunge with him into the sea rather than devote him to such a fate or yield to such an alternative as this wretch in human form had more than hinted—­even should the animal instinct, underlying every nature, presume to dictate to reason at the last!

We could but die—­that was the very worst that Fate had in store for us—­but die in the body!  How infinitely worse that the soul should perish through the selfish sensuousness of cannibalism, which would degrade life itself below dissolution, even if preserved by such means!

“I am ready now to go to Captain Ambrose for assistance,” said Ada Greene, poising herself before me, and having surrendered or forgotten her first idea, evidently, in the new mania of the moment.  “Of course, he does not intend to leave us here to perish, and he is in the next cabin—­but a step; see how easily I can get to him, and I shall be back before you can say ‘Presto!’”