He accepted new environment and circum-
stance with great coolness, eating from his haver- sack at every opportunity.
On one was piled certain curiously twisted and complicated figures, called “nut-cakes,” On another were heaps of a black-looking sub
stance, which, receiving its hue from molasses, was properly termed “sweet-cake ;” a wonderful favorite in the coterie of Remarkable, A third was filled, to use the language of the housekeeper, with “cards of gingerbread ;” and the last held a “ plum- cake,” so called from the number of large raisins that were showing their black heads in a substance of suspiciously similar color.
It was the first in-
stance of harm being attempted to be done to me --at any rate, the first I had ever found out.
This in
stance of neglect is characteristic of utter discour agement.
He took the peg switchboard of the telegraph, for in-
stance, and developed it to its highest point, to a point that was not even imagined possible by any one else.
It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circum-
stances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.
In them circum-
stances it warn't no trouble to him to throw in an amount of style that was suitable.
In the course of his Narrative, he relates two in-
stances of murderous cruelty,--in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging to a neigh- boring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging.
Events have occurred which have not improved his temper, and in more in
stances than one he has not been allowed to have his own way.
I think there is a good deal of moral strength in helping people in suchcircum
stances."
The shell of the circum-
stances of his life was broken and he was compelled to start forth.
The noise at night would have been annoying to me ordinarily, but I didn't mind it in the present circum-
stances, because it kept me from hearing the quacks detaching legs and arms from the day's cripples.