As we rode along in silence, if any man spoke, Captain Jaynes quieted him with a great oath smothered in his chest, as if by a bed of feathers, and presently I became aware that there were more of us than when we started.  We swarmed through the woods, our company being swelled invisibly from every side, and not only men but women were there.  Both Mistress Allgood and Mistress Longman were pressing on with their petticoats tucked up, and to my great surprise both of the black women who lived at Barry Upper Branch.  They slunk along far to the rear, with knives gleaming like white fire at their girdles, keeping well out of sight of the Barry brothers, who were both of our party, and looking for all the world like two female tigers of some savage jungle in search of prey, since both moved with a curious powerful crouch of secrecy as to her back and hips, and wary roll of fierce eyes.

When we were fairly in the open of Major Beverly’s plantation some few torches were lit, and then I saw that we were indeed a good hundred strong, and of the party were that old graybeard who had played Maid Marion on Mayday, and many of the Morris dancers, and those lusty lads and lasses, and they had been at the cider this time as at the other, but all had their wits at their service.

Not a light was in Major Beverly’s great house, not a stir in the slave quarters.  One would have sworn they were all asleep or dead.  But Captain Jaynes called a halt, and divided us into rank and file like a company of reapers, and to work we went on the great tobacco fields.

I trow it seemed a shame, as it ever does, to invoke that terrible force of the world which man controls, whether to his liberty or his slavery ’tis the question, and bring destruction upon all that fair inflorescence of life.  But sometimes death and destruction are the means to life and immortality.  Those great fields of Major Robert Beverly’s lay before us in the full moonlight, overlapping with the lusty breadth of the new leaves gleaming with silver dew, and upon them we fell.  We hacked and cut, we tore up by the roots.  In a trice we were bedlam loosened—­that is, the ruder part of us.  Some of us worked with no less fury, but still with some sense of our own dignity as destroyers over destruction.  But the rabble who had swelled our ranks were all on fire with rage, and wasted themselves as well as the tobacco.  They filled the air with shouts and wild screams and peals of laughter.  That fiercest joy of the world, the joy of destruction, was upon them, and sure it must have been one of the chiefest of the joys of primitive man, for all in a second it was as if the centuries of civilisation and Christianity had gone for naught, and the great gulf which lies back of us to the past had been leapt.  One had doubted it not, had he seen those old men tearing up the tobacco plants, their mouths dribbling with a slow mutter of curses, for they had drunk much cider, and being aged, and none too well fed, it had