Page:Orange Grove.djvu/350

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rabble of this world as well as from the devoted Sauls of the established church.

On retiring to rest that night she had a singular dream,—one that impressed her with a strange vividness of reality. She thought that she was a slave, and had been sold away from her mother. All the agony she had ever known, compressed into one moment, could not equal what she suffered for two hours when she lay sobbing convulsively on her mother's breast, with her master standing by, ready to grasp her at any moment. At last he bade her rise. She looked out at the window where the moon was shining brightly as if in mockery of her wo, and the trees were waving gracefully in the calm beauty of the evening's delightful solitude regardless of her suffering.

She was ready to curse the God who gave her life, and then looked complacently on the misery it brought her without interposing an avenging hand, when she felt the touch of her master's hand on her arm and bade him desist at his peril. The burning indignation with which she shrunk from his touch and defied him as if her soul were on fire, awoke her.

There she lay with no other sensation than that of awaking from peaceful slumber,—no startling emotion, no hurried breathing, the usual accompaniment of such nightmare dreams disturbed her, but she could not rid herself of the awful, frenzied desperation with which her Anglo-Saxon blood rose in revolt, contrasting it with the unrevengeful submission of the African to centuries of oppression, and the sublime fervor of his religious nature with that