With the sense of injury came a thirst for revenge. My companions began to talk of violence and dream of blood. A week before there was not one of them who would not have risked his life to save his master's; the scene was now changed--my master walked daily, though without knowing it, among volcanoes; all looked upon him askant, and muttered curses as he passed. A kinder-hearted man and easier master never lived; and it may seem incredible that he should be hated without any real cause. Imaginary causes are, however, always the most efficacious in exciting jealousy and hatred, In affairs of the affections, slaves and the members of political factions are equally unreasonable. The only difference in the effect is, that the one cannot, while the other can, and _does_, change his masters when his whim changes. That fatal book infected my own spirit as deeply as it did those of the others, and made me as sour and discontented as they. I began to have sentimental notions about liberty and equality, the dignity of man, the nobleness of freedom, and so-forth; and a stupid ambition, a vague notion that I was born to be a king or president, or some such great personage, filled my imagination, and made me a willing listener to, and sharer in, the schemes of violence and desperation which my fellow-slaves soon began to frame. It is wonderful, that among the many thoughts that now crowded my brain, no memory of my original condition arose to teach me the folly of my desires. But, and I repeat it again, the past was dead with me; I lived only for the present. A little incident that soon befell me will show the reader how completely my feelings were identified with my condition, and how deeply the lessons of that unlucky pamphlet had sunk into my spirit. My little playmate, master Tommy, who was not above six years old, being of an irascible temper, sometimes quarrelled with me; on which occasions, as I mentioned before, he used to beat me; a liberty I rather encouraged than otherwise, since I gained by it--though my master strictly forbade the youth to take it. Now, as soon as my head began to fill with the direful and magnificent conceptions of a malecontent and conspirator, I waxed weary of child's play and master Tommy, who, falling into a passion with me for that reason, proceeded, on a certain occasion, to pommel my ribs with a fist about equal in weight to the paw of a gadfly. I was incensed, I may say enraged, at the poor child, and repaid the violence by shaking him almost to death. Indeed, I felt for a while as if I could have killed him; and I know not whether I might not have done it (for the devil had on the sudden got into my spirit), had not his father discovered what I was doing, and run to his assistance.