Page:The White Slave, or Memoirs of a Fugitive.djvu/115

 dancers in the opposite corner. Indeed, the dancing group grew thinner and thinner, and the squeak of the fiddle sounded weaker and weaker, till at last the fiddler threw down his instrument, and with his remaining adherents hastened to swell the audience of a performer whose powers so much out-matched his own.

As the sermon proceeded, the groans and cries of mercy and amen, grew louder and more frequent; and several, overcome by their feelings, or wishing, or affecting to be so, fell flat upon the ground, and screamed and shouted as if they were possessed by evil spirits. So strong was the contagion, and so powerful the sympathetic infectiousness of this spiritual intoxication, that I, a mere looker on, felt a strong impulse to rush among the crowd, and to shriek and shout with the rest. The paroxysm was now at its height, and the speaker was almost exhausted by his vehement gesticulation, when stamping his foot, with more than common energy — he burst in the head of the barrel and tumbled headlong among his auditors.

This unlucky accident instantly converted the cries and groans of his hearers, into shouts of irrepressible laughter; and they seemed to pass all at once, from a state of the utmost terror and solemnity, into outrageous and uncontrollable merriment. The fiddler crept out from amidst the hurly burly, caught up his fiddle, and struck up a lively air, — I forget the name of it, but I recollect very well that it contained some allusion to the disaster of his rival. The dance was renewed; while the preacher, with a few of his more attached hearers, slunk away' mortified and disheartened. The dancers grew more boisterous, and the fiddler played his best; till at last the party had fairly tired themselves out, and were too much exhausted to keep it up any longer.

Men born and bred in slavery, are not men but children. Their faculties are never permitted to unfold themselves; and it is the aim of their masters, and the necessary effect of their condition, to keep them in a state of perpetual imbecility. Tyranny is ever hostile to every species of mental developement; for a state of ignorance involves of necessity, a state of degradation, and of helplessness.