Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17.djvu/372

364 face, as if she saw some pleasant vision.

The minister came to pray with her, and to talk what he called religion. But it sounded to poor Chloe more than ever like the murmuring of the sea. She turned her face away from him and said nothing. With what little mental strength she had, she rejected the idea that the curse of Ham, whoever he might be, justified the treatment she had received. She had no idea what a heathen was, but she concluded it meant something bad; and she had often told Tom she didn't like to have the minister talk that way, for it sounded like calling her names.

At last the weary one passed away from a world where the doings had all been dark and incomprehensible to her. But her soul was like that of a little child; and Jesus has said, "Of such are the kingdom of heaven." They found under her pillow little Tommy's ragged gown, and a pink shell. Why the shell was there no one could conjecture. The pine box containing her remains was placed across the foot of Mr. Lawton's grave, at whose side his widow would repose when her hour should come. It was the custom to place slaves thus at the feet of their masters, even in the graveyard.

The Reverend Mr. Gordonmammon concluded to buy a young black woman, that Tom might not be again induced to stray off after Dinah; and Tom passively yielded to the second arrangement, as he had to the first.

In two years after Sukey Larkin took possession of little Tommy, she sent him to Virginia to be exchanged for tobacco; with the proceeds of which she bought a gold necklace, and a flashy silk dress, changeable between grass-green and orange; and great was her satisfaction to astonish Catharine Lawton with her splendor the next time they met at a party.

I never heard that poor Chloe's ghost haunted either them or the Widow Lawton. Wherever slavery exerts its baneful influence, it produces the same results,—searing the conscience and blinding the understanding to the most obvious distinctions between right and wrong.

There is no record of little Tommy's fate. He disappeared among "the dark, sad millions," who knew not father or mother, and had no portion in wife or child.

HE Summer comes, and the Summer goes.

Wild-flowers are fringing the dusty lanes,

The sparrows go darting through fragrant rains,

And, all of a sudden,—it snows!

Dear Heart! our lives so happily flow,

So lightly we heed the flying hours,

We only know Winter is gone—by the flowers,

We only know Winter is come—by the Snow!