The Heart

When we were fairly in the open of Major Beverly's plantation some

few torches were lit, and then I saw that we were indeed a good

hundred strong, and of the party were that old graybeard who had

played Maid Marion on Mayday, and many of the Morris dancers, and

those lusty lads and lasses, and they had been at the cider this

time as at the other, but all had their wits at their service.

Not a light was in Major Beverly's great house, not a stir in the

slave quarters. One would have sworn they were all asleep or dead.

But Captain Jaynes called a halt, and divided us into rank and file

like a company of reapers, and to work we went on the great tobacco

fields.

I trow it seemed a shame, as it ever does, to invoke that terrible

force of the world which man controls, whether to his liberty or his

slavery 'tis the question, and bring destruction upon all that fair

inflorescence of life. But sometimes death and destruction are the

means to life and immortality. Those great fields of Major Robert

Beverly's lay before us in the full moonlight, overlapping with the

lusty breadth of the new leaves gleaming with silver dew, and upon

them we fell. We hacked and cut, we tore up by the roots. In a trice

we were bedlam loosened--that is, the ruder part of us. Some of

us worked with no less fury, but still with some sense of our own

dignity as destroyers over destruction. But the rabble who had

swelled our ranks were all on fire with rage, and wasted themselves

as well as the tobacco. They filled the air with shouts and wild

screams and peals of laughter. That fiercest joy of the world, the

joy of destruction, was upon them, and sure it must have been one of

the chiefest of the joys of primitive man, for all in a second it

was as if the centuries of civilisation and Christianity had gone

for naught, and the great gulf which lies back of us to the past had

been leapt. One had doubted it not, had he seen those old men

tearing up the tobacco plants, their mouths dribbling with a slow

mutter of curses, for they had drunk much cider, and being aged, and

none too well fed, it had more hold on them than on some of the

others; and to see the women lost to all sense of decency, with

their petticoats girded high on account of the dew, striding among

the plants with high flings of stalwart legs, then slashing right

and left with an uncertainty of fury which threatened not only

themselves but their neighbours as well as the tobacco, and

shrieking now and then, regardless of who might hear, "Down with the

king!"