IN THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE.

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over smoky fires. There were three of these stables, each holding a hundred head of labour. The horses lived close by, and certainly could not have felt jealous of our superior accommodation.

I shall not delay my story, now rapidly drawing to a close, by telling you at any length about my feelings at this time, but I leave it to your sympathy to imagine what they must have been, as bending over my hoe among the coffee-trees, I thought of tender Happy Island, where I had been treated as a man by gentle noble men; and then to wince under the lash of some degraded brute in a white skin, who would be honoured by the company of his master's dog! All my ingratitude rose like a mountain before me, and made my forehead burn, and sometimes stopped my hoe, while Mac's assistant-Bully Bob they used to call him—thought, I daresay, that the tears which watered the young coffee plant on which my eyes were fixed as he struck me, were drawn from me by his brutality; but he was mistaken.

It was the melting tenderness of Happy Island to which his roughness drove my memory back, that made me shed those tears. It was hard for us who liked to do everything with a shout and a song to plod on in enforced silence. No wonder they had to use the lash in order to get half-a-day's work done in the twelve hours.

Take them away-three noisy ruffians-and put Bishop Curwen at our head, with his grand encouraging smile and a heart-spoken word on his lips, and the result would have been two days' work in one, and better done too.

But these fellows cared as little for their masters as they did for us; and we could see it. And then, to think, as I was always doing, of Mr. Wakefield and of Mr. Selby, men whose one satisfaction was to do their duty; how they treated us! Surely it was in order that I might at last see these good men in their true light-aye, and myself too-that God had led

me here, into this Far Country, where my heart in its turn hungered for the crumbs from the Table in my Father's House; but no man gave unto me.

In short, I was allowed to see and feel myself the very suffering I had sometimes wilfully inflicted upon others. The lesson I was learning, while to all appearance I was merely becoming expert in the cultivation of coffee, was that I had nothing in the world to be proud of, that I had richly deserved every crack of Bully Bob's mosquito of a whip, for the shameful disregard of those who had treated me better than I deserved, when I did not know it; that I had been mistaken about everything, and everybody, including my odious self, whom I esteemed so highly; and I vowed a vow, resting on my hoe, while Bully Bob and his two mates were making themselves disagreeable at a distance, that if God should ever restore me to my former life, I would start anew and put the lesson into practice.

That fine young coffee-tree which stood listening there seemed quite sympathetic, and looked pleased, as giving it another good hoeing about its roots, I cried, not loud enough for any one but God and it to hear, "I will arise and go to my Father."

CHAPTER XLI.

A MARCH HARE AND OTHER ANIMALS.

MR. and Mrs., or I suppose I ought to say Mons. and Madame, Pannier were two very different characters, and I decidedly preferred the latter; indeed, I pitied her. She was English, and I made a Mrs. Selby of her.

I was sent up to the house by Mac one day-who, by the way, only ill-treated us when he was drunk, which was not

A WOMAN'S TENDERNESS.

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always-with a note for the master, who was out-diving after his hat, I suppose, or else waiting to be pulled out of the swamp and she came to the door in answer to my knock. She looked as sad as usual, and as kind. I felt that she was trying not to let me see how much she

liked me. I could

see it in her sweet sorrowful eyes. She said it was quite a pleasure to hear the English language even on black lips, and told me to wait a moment, and returned with a piece of cake and a slice of pine-apple, which she gave me with a smile, telling me to eat them there, and wipe my mouth before I joined my fellow-labourers.

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'Percy," I answered, in spite of my having intended to say Pomo; and rather indistinctly on account of the cake.

"And so you are a Christian?" said she, looking both surprised and pleased.

She then asked me where I had been baptized. I told her as much as I could and as shortly as I could, about Happy Island, Bishop Curwen, Mr. Wakefield, and Mr. and Mrs. Selby. She interrupted me at that name, by asking, not without a start:

"Are you happy here?"

"No," I answered, more shaken by this woman's tenderness than by a hundred heart-hardening lashes from the stoutest whips, which are but weakness after all. "No, not happy, but it is good for me—”

"Do they beat you, Percy?"

"Yes. But I know I do my best, and so I don't care."

"Who beats you? Mac?"

"No. Bully Bob; he is the worst," I answered quite gravely.

She laughed at this, and said, "You mean Robert-"

"It is all the same," said I, "I take it from the hand of God."

She then looked upon me in silence for a moment or two, but her eyes said all the time, "You are not the only unhappy one here."

At once I perceived that in her I had a friend.

With a sigh which would not be stifled she turned to go away, but came back as if she had suddenly changed her mind, and would say what she had intended to have left unsaid. "Can you manage a horse?" she asked.

"That I can," said I; "and should like it much better than hoeing the coffee-plants."

"Then you shall do it here, if I can manage it for us."

"Thank you! Thank you," I cried, my shyness scattered to the winds. "Thank you for being so like Mrs. Selby." "Do you know to whom you are speaking?" she asked rather seriously.

"I beg your pardon if I have been rude," said I; "perhaps I oughtn't to have spoken out so to my master's wife; but Mrs. Selby used to let me. We used to call her Mary; and she would get angry with us for being shy and silent, and for hiding from her what we thought and felt."

"And so you think I am like this good Mrs. Selby, do you? Well, I will be like her also in wishing you to tell me all you think and feel. Now you must go, Percy; and when they beat you and are unkind to you, think of me, and pray God to have mercy on us both."

With the old frank Happy Island spirit full upon me, I stretched out my hand and said good bye. She smiled, allowed me to shake her delicate white hand, with its gold rings and flashing stones, and with a pretty nod of her graceful head dismissed me and closed the door.

As I went back to my work, I kept repeating her words aloud, and stumbled over ruts and furrows in such a clumsy manner that Siama would have been confirmed in her opinion that I was born to be a white man had she been there to see.

"AN UNCERTAIN TEMPER."

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I was light-headed and light-hearted with joy, and felt that the rain and gloom had cleared away, and that there was sunshine within me as well as without. I looked up to heaven and thanked God again and again, until I became conscious that I was in sight of the plantation and that they would probably think me mad. I got a terrible blowing up from Mac, and a lash from "Tyrannical Tommy," but it had no more effect upon me than a flea-bite. He couldn't hit my heart.

Not long after this-imagine my joy-I was told that I was to become house servant to Mr. and Mrs. Pannier; and a first rate servant I was too, for I worked with an able body and a willing heart, and not without experience, having been "tootered" in my youth.

Mr. Pannier, when he was in a good humour, used to shade his eyes when he sat down to dinner; he said the glasses and the silver dazzled him so. Mr. Pannier, when he was in a bad humour, used to fling said glasses and silver at my head. Poor Mrs. Pannier! she led a terrible life of it. I had not been house servant long before I had a pretty vivid conception of what an unpleasant kind of creature a March hare must be, and I was thankful that, as Mrs. Pannier said, she had never seen one, they were probably uncommon. To Mr. Pannier's madness was opposed Mrs. Pannier's meekness. I used often to find her alone and crying, and then she would sob out, not to me or to any one in particular, but to heaven and earth as witnesses of her trouble:

"Réné "—her husband's name, which at first I confounded with the remarkably wet weather-"Réné is so terribly uncertain in his temper."

Though I was really sorry for her, yet for myself I was as happy as a king, and dodged the glasses and the knives and forks with much satisfaction, and not without a considerable amount of fun, for between you and me, Mr. Pannier made very bad shots, and destroyed a great deal of