She listened; human voices, raised above the ordinary
pitch, were mingling with the sounds. She lay till she could endure it
no longer. Coming down to the piazza, she saw a white man mending a
harness on a horse. "Those whips," said she, inquiringly,--"they have
rather interfered with my peace. Any of the colored people been doing
wrong?" He hesitated, and kept on fixing his harness, till, finally, he
turned round,--for he had been standing with his back to her and, as she
supposed, to hide his chagrin at being questioned on so trying a
subject. "Truth is, Madam," said he, taking a large piece of tobacco and
a knife from his pocket, and helping himself slowly,--"truth is, we have
so much of this work to do, we have to begin early. Sorry it disturbed
you;" and he gathered up the reins and drove off.
The whips kept up their racket. "Here," said she to herself, "is the
house of Bondage. How can I spend a month here?" She thought that she
would peep round the house. Yet she feared that she should be considered
as intruding into things which she had better not meddle with. But the
screams became so fearful that she could no longer restrain herself. She
rushed round the corner of the house, and came full against a black
woman rinsing some fustian clothes in a tub near the rain-spout.
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