The influence of Cassy over him was of a strange and singular kind.  He was her owner, her tyrant and tormentor.  She was, as he knew, wholly, and without any possibility of help or redress, in his hands; and yet so it is, that the most brutal man cannot live in constant association with a strong female influence, and not be greatly controlled by it.  When he first bought her, she was, as she said, a woman delicately bred; and then he crushed her, without scruple, beneath the foot of his brutality.  But, as time, and debasing influences, and despair, hardened womanhood within her, and waked the fires of fiercer passions, she had become in a measure his mistress, and he alternately tyrannized over and dreaded her.

This influence had become more harassing and decided, since partial insanity had given a strange, weird, unsettled cast to all her words and language.

A night or two after this, Legree was sitting in the old sitting-room, by the side of a flickering wood fire, that threw uncertain glances round the room.  It was a stormy, windy night, such as raises whole squadrons of nondescript noises in rickety old houses.  Windows were rattling, shutters flapping, and wind carousing, rumbling, and tumbling down the chimney, and, every once in a while, puffing out smoke and ashes, as if a legion of spirits were coming after them.  Legree had been casting up accounts and reading newspapers for some hours, while Cassy sat in the corner; sullenly looking into the fire.  Legree laid down his paper, and seeing an old book lying on the table, which he had noticed Cassy reading, the first part of the evening, took it up, and began to turn it over.  It was one of those collections of stories of bloody murders, ghostly legends, and supernatural visitations, which, coarsely got up and illustrated, have a strange fascination for one who once begins to read them.

Legree poohed and pished, but read, turning page after page, till, finally, after reading some way, he threw down the book, with an oath.

“You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Cass?” said he, taking the tongs and settling the fire.  “I thought you’d more sense than to let noises scare you.”

“No matter what I believe,” said Cassy, sullenly.

“Fellows used to try to frighten me with their yarns at sea,” said Legree.  “Never come it round me that way.  I’m too tough for any such trash, tell ye.”

Cassy sat looking intensely at him in the shadow of the corner.  There was that strange light in her eyes that always impressed Legree with uneasiness.

“Them noises was nothing but rats and the wind,” said Legree.  “Rats will make a devil of a noise.  I used to hear ’em sometimes down in the hold of the ship; and wind,—­Lord’s sake! ye can make anything out o’ wind.”

Cassy knew Legree was uneasy under her eyes, and, therefore, she made no answer, but sat fixing them on him, with that strange, unearthly expression, as before.