The possibility of ever becoming anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever.

A life of living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom.

The fiends, who rushed into the prison when we were first put there, continued to visit me,{233} and to ply me with questions and with their tantalizing remarks.

I was insulted, but helpless; keenly alive to the demands of justice and liberty, but with no means of asserting them.

To talk to those imps about justice and mercy, would have been as absurd as to reason with bears and tigers.