But Mrs. Crosly's report was of a very different character. She said, "There has never been the half told of this hell upon earth--the awful wickedness on these Red River plantations, where I have lived ever since I was fifteen years old. If you knew what I have passed through, you would not wonder that there is nothing but a wreck left of me. I married a plantation blacksmith when a young girl of fifteen, and left my people in Indiana, as my husband was hired by a rich slave-holder, Mr. Samuel Lay, who lived on Red River. We lived on his plantation many years, though he used to do a great deal in ironing negroes for neighboring planters." I told her of the slave-irons I had found on a deserted plantation, to take to my Michigan home. "Don't let the people here know it," she said, "or they will take them from you and drop them in the river; for they bury them, or throw them in the river or creek, to put them out of sight of Yankees. When the city was taken they sent painters all over the city, with brushes and paint-buckets, to paint over all advertising signs of slaves for sale, and hid all slave-irons they could lay hands on." I told her that was done in Natchez, when that city was taken. "And that is just what they did," she went on, "in Vicksburg. Among the slave-irons you found, were there any of those new-fashioned gags?" I told her that there were not. "You ought to get some of them. If I were at home I could get you two or three kinds; but you ought to see the new gags anyhow. They are made with barbs, as they make on fish-hooks, and they pierce the tongue if they attempt to speak or make a noise. They can't live many hours with one of them in their mouths, for the tongue swells up so. Mr. Lay had an old slave woman we called Aunt Hannah whipped, and gagged with that new gag, and left her all night in her cabin; and when I opened her door her tongue was swollen out of her mouth and looked so awful, I wouldn't have known her if she hadn't been in her own cabin. I told 'em she groaned so, I reckoned she was dying, and they sent for the doctor to come and cut the barbs out, and he told Mr. Lay she would have died in an hour longer. It was a long time before she recovered from it. But as near as she was to dying, the overseer left Ben all night with that kind of a gag; and they found him dead in the morning. You of the North have no idea of the perfect hell upon earth we've had down here. Mr. Lay brought Alice from Kentucky, and she'd been a kitchen-maid, and never worked in the cotton-field till she came here. The overseer was a mighty hard man, and he drew that long whip of his over her shoulders so often because she couldn't keep up with the other hands, that she ran away in the bush and was gone two days before they caught her. Then they whipped her awfully, and in two or three days they drove her out in the field. Within a week she ran away again, and was gone about two weeks.