We constantly received accessions to our number, but never acquisitions, for the poor, ill-fed, ill-kept wretches that came in there, "sold (as Atkins said) for a mere song," were desolate and revolting to see.
Charley found one or two old books, that he seemed to read and re-read; indifferent novels, perhaps, that served, at least, to keep down the ravening tortures of thought. I lent him my Testament, and he read a great deal in it. He said that he had one, but had left it with his wife. He was a member of the Methodist Church; had gone on Sunday afternoons to a school that had been established for the benefit of colored people, and thus, unknown to his master, had acquired the first principles of a good education. He could read and write, and was in possession of the rudiments of arithmetic. He told me that his wife had not had the opportunities he had, and therefore she was more deficient, but he added, "she had a great thirst for knowledge, such as I have never seen excelled, and rarely equalled. I have known her, after the close of her daily labors, devote the better portion of the night to study. I gave her all the instruction I could, and she was beginning to read with considerable accuracy; but all that is over, past and gone now." And again he ground his teeth fiercely, and a wild, lurid light gathered in his eye.
This man almost made me oblivious of my own grief, in sympathy for his. I did all I could by "moral suasion," as the politicians say, to soften his resentment. I bade him turn his thoughts toward that religion which he had espoused.
"I have no religion for this," he would bitterly say.
And in truth, I fear me much if the heroism of saints would hold out on such occasions. There, fastened to that impassioned husband's heart, playing with its dearest chords, was the fang-like hand of the white man! Oh, slow tortures! in comparison to which that of Prometheus was very pleasure. There is no Tartarus like that of wounded, agonized domestic love! Far away from him, in a lonely cabin, he beheld his stricken wife and all his "pretty chickens" pining and unprotected.
Slowly, after a few days, he relapsed into that stony sort of despair that denies itself the gratification of speech. The change was very painfully visible to me, and I tried, by every artifice, to arouse him; but I had no power to wake him.
"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak,
Whispers the o'erfraught heart, and bids it break."
And soon learning this, I left him, a remorseless prey to that "rooted sorrow" of the brain.
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