I got upon the floor, or who cut the rope I never knew.  Doctor Tillotson had hold of my wrist, feeling my pulse; while mistress held a camphor bottle in one hand and a bottle of hartshorn in the other.  The doctor helped me up from the floor and set me in a chair, when I discovered that I was bleeding very freely from the nose and mouth.  He called for a basin and bled me in my left arm, and then sent me over home by two of his men.  Next day my neck was dreadfully swollen, and my throat was so sore that it was with difficulty that I could swallow meat for more than a week.  At the end of a fortnight, master having learnt all the particulars respecting my sickness, called me to account, and gave me seventy-eight lashes, and this was the end of my crazy love and courtship with Mary.

Shortly after this, Mary was one Sunday down in her master’s barn, where she had been sent by her mistress to look for new nests where a number of the hens were supposed to have been laying, as the eggs had not been found elsewhere.  While in the barn, Mary was surprised by William Tillotson, her master’s son, who ordered her to take her bed among the hay and submit to his lustful passion.  This she strenuously refused to do, telling him of the punishment she had already suffered from her former mistress for a similar act of conduct, and reminding him at the same time of his wife, whose vengeance she would have to dread; but William was not to be put off, nor his base passion to go unsatisfied, by any excuse that Mary could make, so he at once resorted to force.  Mary screamed at the top of her voice.  Now the negro Dan was just in the act of passing the barn at the time, when he heard Mary’s voice he rushed into the barn, and demanded in a loud voice what was the matter? when, to his horror, he beheld William upon the barn floor, and Mary struggling but in vain to rise.  William, instead of desisting from his brutal purpose, with a dreadful oath ordered Dan to clear out; but the sight of the outrage on her whom, I now firmly believe he loved better than his own soul, made poor Dan completely forget himself—­and made him forget too, in that fatal moment what he afterwards wished he had remembered.  Dan seized a pitchfork and plunged it into young Tillotson’s back; the prongs went in between his shoulders, and one of them had penetrated the left lung.  Young Tillotson expired almost immediately, and Dan seeing what he had done, ran off at once to the woods and swamps, and was seen no more for about two months.  Mrs. Tillotson, who had heard Mary scream, was on the balcony, and called out to Dan to know the cause, Dan made no reply but took to his heels.  Mrs. Tillotson alarmed at this, and suspecting at once that something was wrong, hastened to the barn, followed by William’s wife who happened to be there, and when they saw poor William’s corpse, and Mary standing by, they both fainted.  Poor Mary, frightened to death, turned into the house and informed her young mistress,