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314 UNCLE TOM'’S CABIN; OR,

know if I won't? He'll be the first nigger that ever came it
round me! I'll break every bone in his body, but he shall give
u ,

Just then the door opened, and Sambo entered. He came
forward, bowing, and holding out something in a paper.

‘What's that, you dog ?”’ said Legree.

« It’s a witch thing, mas’r !”

«A what ?”

“ Something that niggers gets from witches. Keeps ‘em from
feelin’ when they's flogged. He had it tied round his neck with
a black string.”

Legree, like most godless and cruel men, was superstitious.
He took the paper, and opened it uneasily.

There dropped out of it a silver dollar, and a long, shining curl
of fair bair—hair which, like a living thing, twined itself round
Legree’s fingers.

«Damnation !” he screamed, in sudden passion, stamping on
the floor, and pulling furiously at the hair, as if it burned him.
«“ Where did this come from? ‘Take it off !—burn it up!—burn
it up!” he screamed, tearing it off, and throwing it into the char-
coal. ‘* What did you bring it to me for?”

Sambo stood with his heavy mouth wide open, and aghast with
wonder; and Cassy, who was preparing to leave the apartment,
stopped, and looked at him in perfect amazement.

«“ Don’t you bring me any more of your devilish things !” said
he, shaking his fist at Sambo, who retreated hastily towards the
door; and, picking up the silver dollar, he sent it smashing
through the window-pane out into the darkness.

Sambo was glad to make his escape. When he was gone,
Legree seemed a little ashamed of his fit of alarm. Fle sat dog-
gedly down in his chair, and began sullenly sipping his tumbler
of punch.

Cassy prepared herself for going out, unobserved by him; and
slipped away to minister to poor Tom, as we have already related.

‘And what was the matter with Legree? and what was there in a
simple curl of fair hair to appal that brutal man, familiar with every
form of cruelty ? To answer this, we must carry the reader back-
ward in his history. Hard and reprobate ‘as the godless man
seemed now, there had been a time when he had been rocked on
the bosom of a mother—cradled with prayers and pious hymns—
his now seared brow bedewed with the waters of holy baptism.
In early childhood a fair-haired woman had led him, at the sound
of Sabbath bell, to worship and to pray. Far in New England
that mother had trained her only son with long, unwearied love,
and patient prayers. Born of a hard-tempered sire, on whom
that gentle woman had wasted a world of unvalued love, Legree
had followed in the steps of his father. Boisterous, unruly and
tyrannical, he despised all her counsel, and would uone of her

 

—— er