If a corpse could speak, its voice might be the weak and hollow quaver in which the outcast made this answer. An awful feeling rose in the heart of Harrington, for he knew by the accent of the ghastly stranger that he was a negro, and the title he had bestowed upon him indicated that he was a runaway slave. “Where do you come from? Where have you been?” he asked quickly. The outcast trembled violently throughout his lank frame, and his jaws chattered. “Oh, Marster, don’t ask me,” he answered in his weak, hollow voice. “I’ve been in hell, Marster, and I’ve got away. I’ve been in hell, Marster, sure. Don’t send me back, now don’t. Have a little mercy, Marster, and let me go.” So awful were the words in that lone hour; so awful the hollow and sepulchral voice that uttered them; so awful the motion of the face which writhed in speaking, as though in some rending agony; so awful and so dreadful the black skeleton gauntness, the monstrous raggedness, the Druidic filth of the trembling figure, with its swathed neck showing like some enormous circle of wen, and the poisonous stench sickening the whole night with its exhalations, that Harrington instinctively recoiled. Up from the lowest abysses of social wretchedness they swarmed into his mind;—the degraded of every low condition and degree—the neglected, the forgotten, the forlorn, the scum and dregs and ordure of mankind—the thieves, the beggars, the tatterdemalion sots and prostitutes and stabbers—the bloated, brutal, malformed nightmare monsters of a Humanity transformed to shapes more fearful than the foulest beasts;—up from the dark and fetid dens of the filthiest quarter of the city—up from the sinks and stews of the Black Sea—a wild and grisly company—they swarmed upon him. In all their misery, no misery like this—in all their number, no shape to pair with this. Below the lowest abyss of their wretchedness, yawned a lower, new-come from which, in the haggard pallor of the moon, stood a figure from whose ghastly and abominable Pariah shape the foulest and the vilest of them all would have shrunk away. Below the lowest hell wherein, in sunless crime and vice, their ruined natures were immerged, lay, as in the Inferno of Dante, a hell still lower—the hell decreed by avarice for innocent men, new-risen from which, all loathly foul, all awful with long suffering, stood the dark fugitive, afraid to tell his name, afraid to say from whence he had come, afraid to stand in the presence of his fellow, as though he were some frightful felon dreading the vengeance of mankind! Gasping and shuddering through all his frame, Harrington gazed at him. “O my country!” he murmured, “that such a thing as this should be! That such a wrong as this should be wrought by you!” The fugitive seemed to hear some fragment of his words, for he spoke instantly.