Down
dropped the smuggler, and ashore came the boat.
"I am mortally wounded, Master Tummas," quoth Obed; and I was
confoundedly frightened at first, from the unusual proximity of the
injured part to his head; but the overseer, as soon as he could get off
the ground, where he had thrown himself in an uncontrollable fit of
laughter, had the man stripped and laid across a log, where he set his
servant to pick out the pellets with a penknife.
Next night I was awakened out of my first sleep by a peculiar sort of
tap, tap, on the floor, as if a cat with walnut shells had been moving
about the room. The feline race, in all its varieties, is my detestation,
so I slipped out of bed to expel the intruder; but the instant my toe
touched the ground, it was seized as if by a smith's forceps. I drew it
into bed, but the annoyance followed it; and in an agony of alarm and
pain, I thrust my hand down, when my thumb was instantly manacled to the
other suffering member. I now lost my wits altogether, and roared murder,
which brought a servant in with a light, and there I was, thumb and toe,
in the clinch of a land--crab.
I had been exceedingly struck with the beauty of the negro villages on the
old settled estates, which are usually situated in the most picturesque
spots, and I determined to visit the one which lay on a sunny bank full in
view from my window, divided on two sides from the cane pieces by a
precipitous ravine, and on the other two by a high logwood hedge, so like
hawthorn, that I could scarcely tell the difference, even when close to it.
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