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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Ever quiet and obliging, and more than ready to lend a hand in every emer- gency which occurred among the workmen below, he had won the good opinion of all the hands, and spent many hours in helping them with as hearty a good will as ever he worked on a Kentucky farm. When there seemed to be nothing for him to do, he would climb to a nook among the cotton-bales of the upper deck, and busy himself in studying over his Bible,- and it is there we see him now. For a hundred or more miles above New Orleans, the river is higher than the surrounding country, and rolls its tremendous volume between massive levees twenty feet in height. The traveller from the deck of the steamer, as from some floating castle top, overlooks the whole country for miles and miles around. Tom, therefore, had spread out full before him, in plantation after plantation, a map of the life to which he was approaching. He saw the distant slaves at their toil; he saw afar their villages of huts gleam- ing out in long rows on many a plantation, distant from the stately mansions and pleasure-grounds of the master;- and as the moving picture passed on, his poor, foolish heart would be turning backward to the Kentucky farm, with its old shad- owy beeches,- to the master’s house, with its wide, cool halls, and, near by, the lit- tle cabin, overgrown with the multiflora and bignonia. There he seemed to see familiar faces of comrades, who had grown up with him from infancy; he saw his busy wife, bustling in her preparations for his evening meals; he heard the merry laugh of his boys at their play, and the chirrup of the baby at his knee; and then, |
