The overseer nodded, and chewing stolidly, lounged out into the yard, where stood the kitchen, smoke-house, and other outbuildings, and going on through the orchard, emerged upon a blinding space where a row of white-washed cabins, with the gin-house hard by, glared in the hot light. A few negro children, half naked, with a lean and sickly old hound, were grouped in the shade of the gin-house. Near them, in the full blaze of the sunlight, a negro man, in coarse plantation clothes of a dirty white, sat on the ground in a squatting posture, feebly shaking his bare head, to keep off the swarm of insects that tormented him. This was Antony. He was bound in a peculiar manner—bucked, as the plantation slang has it. The ankles were firmly lashed together—the knees drawn up to the chest—the wrists also firmly pinioned and passed over the knees, and between the elbow-joints and the knee-pits, a short stick was inserted, thus holding movelessly in a bundle of agonizing cramp the limbs of the victim. This infernal torture—practised by the tyrants of our marine on their sailors—that class whose helplessness and wrongs most nearly resemble those of slaves—practised also on wretched criminals by the tyrants of our jails—Antony had endured from midnight till now, about two o’clock in the afternoon. Nine years Lafitte’s chattel, he had been badly used from time to time, and, of late, dreadfully. He had learned to read and write a little before he had come to the plantation, and a week before the present time he had picked up a scrap of newspaper on which was a fragment of one of those declamations about liberty, which southern politicians are fools enough to be making on all opportunities, amidst a land of slaves. The fragment had some swagger about the northern oppression of the South, which Antony did not understand any more than anybody else; but it rounded up with Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty or give me Death!” which he understood very well; for from that moment Liberty or Death was a phrase which spoke like a voice in his mind, urging him to escape from his bondage. The next thing was to write a pass, make a package addressed to the house of Lafitte Brothers, New Orleans, and with this evidence of his assumed mission endeavor to reach that city, where he meant to smuggle himself into the hold of some vessel northward bound.