The old man staggered, but the kind old lady caught him, and as he leaned upon her shoulder his face grew hard and blanched; then he removed his hat, and his gray hair streamed over his gaunt features.  “Let us pray!” he said.

The preacher plodded to his next appointment as if he had still a child, and his sermon was as full and straightforward.  He announced his bereavement from the pulpit when he had done, and the whole country was alarmed and excited.  He bore the tidings to his desolate home, and his stricken wife heard it with a stern resignation.  Thenceforward he preached more of the burning pit, and less of the golden city; his eyes were full of fierce light, and his visage grew long and ghastly.  He denied himself all joys and comforts; his prayers rang in the midnight through the gloomy parsonage; and he toiled in the ministry as if reckless of life, and anxious to lose it in his Master’s service.  The end came at last; the world closed over the grim couple, and they hoped through the grave’s portal to find their child.

When Paul awoke from his nap in the sulky, he found himself far in the forest, and moving swiftly forward.  A huge negro, with bloodshot eyes, was transferring him to an evil-looking white man, and he struggled in the latter’s arms, crying for his papa.

The negro drew a long knife from his breast and flourished it before Paul’s face.  “Hold um jaw, or I kill um dead!” he muttered.  “Got um grave dug out yer.”

“O yer young yerlin!” said the other man, boxing Paul’s ears, “yer don’t know yer own father, don’t yer?  I’m yer parpa!”

“You are not,” cried Paul.  “Where are you taking me?  Where is the church, and the sulky, and old Bob?”

The negro drove his knife so close to Paul’s throat that the boy flinched and shrieked.

“You dare to say fader to anybody,” yelled the negro, “and I cut yo’ heart out!  You dare to tell yer name, or yer fader’s name, or wha yo come from, and I cut yo’ eyes out!  I cut yo’ heart and eyes out—­do yo’ yar?”

The lad was cowed into cold, tearless terror; he shrank from the glittering edge, and trembled at the giant’s murderous expression.  He thought they had brought him to this lonely spot to slay him, and he embraced silence as the only chance for his young life.  He wondered if this were not one of his wild imaginings, or if it had not something to do with the punishment pronounced in the morning’s fierce sermon.

The two men came to a ruined cabin after awhile; it was buried in deep shade; the logs were worm-eaten, and the clay chimney had fallen down.  They climbed by a creaking ladder into the loft and laid Paul upon a ragged bed.  A young negro woman and her child were there, and the boy saw that her foot was shackled to the floor, for the chain rattled as she moved.  They gave him a piece of beef and a corn-cake, and stripping him of his tidy clothes, dressed him in the coarse blue drilling worn by slaves.  The two men drank frequently from the same bottle, talking in low tones, and after a time both of them lay down and slept.  The woman dandled her child to and fro, for it moaned painfully, and the pines without made a deep dirge.  No birds trilled or screamed in this desert place, but a roaring as of loud waters was borne now and then on the twilight; it was the bay close below them, making thunder upon the beach.