“Yes, Antony,” she replied, speaking in a calmer voice, as of one whose sufferings, whatever they might be, were remote from her, or as nothing to her own, “Antony is one. I saw the wretch just now, as I went down to the cabins. There you have him bucked in this scorching heat, his head bleeding where you and Tassle beat him with your whipstocks, and the flies tormenting him. Is there another planter in the parish that would treat that boy so? No wonder he ran away, like his brother before him. He might as well be in Hell as on this plantation. They might all as well be in Hell—as they are. Sweltering in the cotton-field, on a Sunday, too, there they are, fifty miserable wretches—hark, now! Tassle is laying it on to some of them. That is the howl of some of the wenches. Listen to that!” Softened by the distance, but heard distinctly in the sultry stillness, came up from the cotton-fields a confusion of dismal screeches. Madame Lafitte sullenly listened, till they wailed away, the planter meanwhile calmly drinking his goblet of iced claret, and then filling the glass again from a slender bottle standing in a cooler on the table. “These are the sounds I have to listen to, day after day, and year after year,” hoarsely murmured Madame Lafitte, her bosom heaving convulsively above her clasped arms, and her eyes burning with dark fire in the pale gloom of her face. “Every hour in the day they come from the field. All through the evening from the gin-house. Day and night, night and day, the yelling of those unhappy creatures is dinned into my ears. That is my music.” Mr. Lafitte, who had resumed his former attitude, and was still tilting his chair, paused, with his eyes fixed upon his wife, and shook with long, silent, devilish merriment, his black familiar wobbling meanwhile in the pool beneath him. Then, in his softest, smoothest voice, he began to curse and swear, if what was rather a flood of profane exclamations may be so described. All names held sacred, grotesquely conjoined with secular names and titles, and poured forth in fluent and rapid succession, composed the outflow of a profanity inexpressibly awful, both from its nature and from the smooth and serene tones in which it found utterance. Madame Lafitte listened to him aghast, for she had never heard this from his lips before, and a dim, blind foreboding that it portended some horrible change in his attitude toward her, filled her soul. Ending it presently in another spasm of chuckling merriment, as if what seemed a mere depraved desire for blasphemy was satisfied, Mr. Lafitte took up the conversation. “It is positively delightful, Josephine,” he remarked, “to hear you lamenting the trouncing of the dear negroes. But, not to dwell upon this touching outbreak of philanthropy, permit me—for I feel refreshingly wicked to-day—permit me to ask you, my angel, if you know what made me marry you?” She looked at him for a moment with a face of mingled wonder, scorn and loathing.