And, without a sound, inclined him to keep looking o’er his chair,
To keep turning to the black cat, on his shoulder o’er the chair,
With a look that held despair!
(The Yankee skipper relates that he had formerly been a slave-dealer, and that having bought a negro with his child, he was entreated not to part them.)
“Deaf was I to all compassion; brutally I laid the lash on
His defenceless naked shoulders; yet I tortured him in vain
And my anger growing bigger, out with pistol, pull’d the trigger;
With a cry, dropp’d down the nigger, with a startling cry of pain,
With the spasm of the death-pang shooting o’er his face of pain,
Never more to move again!”