|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
|
and painful expression of countenance. Her bonnet fell back, and long wavy streams of black hair fell around her singular and melancholy face. “It’s no use, my poor fellow!” she broke out, at last, “it’s of no use, this you’ve been trying to do. You were a brave fellow,- you had the right on your side; but it’s all in vain, and out of the question, for you to struggle. You are in the devil’s hands;- he is the strongest, and you must give up!” Give up! and had not human weakness and physical agony whispered that, be- fore? Tom started; for the bitter woman, with her wild eyes and melancholy voice, seemed to him an embodiment of the temptation with which he had been wrestling. “O Lord! O Lord!” he groaned, “how can I give up?” “There’s no use calling on the Lord,- He never hears,” said the woman, stead- ily; “there isn’t any God, I believe; or, if there is, He’s taken sides against us. All goes against us, heaven and earth. Everything is pushing us into hell. Why shouldn’t we go?” Tom closed his eyes, and shuddered at the dark, atheistic words. “You see,” said the woman, “you don’t know anything about it;- I do. I’ve been on this place five years, body and soul, under this man’s foot; and I hate him as I do the devil! Here you are, on a lone plantation, ten miles from any other, in the swamps; not a white person here, who could testify if you were burned alive, if you were scalded, cut into inch-pieces, set up for the dogs to tear, or hung up |
