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Rh Her father and his friends sat near by crosslegged and dumbly smoking .... they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders; On a bank lounged the trapper .... he was dressed mostly in skins .... his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, One hand rested on his rifle .... the other hand held firmly the wrist of the red girl, She had long eyelashes .... her head was bare .... her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reached to her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside, I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile, Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak, And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him, And brought water and filled a tub for his sweated body and bruised feet, And gave him a room that entered from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes, And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness, And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles; He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and passed north, I had him sit next me at table .... my firelock leaned in the corner.

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore, Twenty-eight young men, and all so friendly, Twenty-eight years of womanly life, and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair, Little streams passed all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also passed over their bodies, It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies swell to the sun .... they do not ask who seizes fast to them,