"Impossible, woman, impossible!" says the Doctor, more than ever satisfied of her Satanic character by what he counts her blasphemous speech. "Adaly is delirious,--fearfully excited; it would destroy her. The only hope is in perfect quietude." The woman releases her grasp. "Please, Doctor, let me come to-morrow. I must see her! I will see her!" "You shall not," said the Doctor, with solemnity,--"never, with my permission. Go to your home, woman, and pray God to have mercy on you." "Monster!" exclaimed she, passionately, as she shook the Doctor's arm, still under her grasp; and murmuring other words in language the good man did not comprehend, she slipped silently down the yard,--away into the darkness. DOWN THE RIVER. She was of pure race, black as her first ancestor,--if, indeed, she ever had an ancestor, and were not an indigenous outcrop of African soil,--so black that the sun could gild her. Her countenance was as unlovely as it is possible for one to be that owns the cheeriest of smiles and the most dazzling of teeth. It would have been difficult to say how old she was, though she had the effect of being undersized, and, with sharp shoulders, elbows, and knees, seemed scarcely possessed of a rounded muscle in all her lithe and agile frame. Nevertheless, she was a dancer by profession,--if she could have dignified her most frequent occupation by the title of profession. With a thin blue scarf turbaned round her head in floating ends, and with scanty and clinging array otherwise, tossing a tambourine, and singing wild, meaningless songs, she used to whirl and spring on the grass-plot of an evening, the young masters and mistresses smiling and applauding from the verandah, while the wind-blown flame of a flaring pitch-pine knot, held by little Pluto, gave her strange careering shadows for partner. She had not yet been allotted to any particular task by day, now running errands of the house, now tending the sick, now, in punishment of misdemeanors, relieving an exhausted hand in the field,--for, though all along the upland lay the piny woods of the turpentine-orchards, she belonged to an estate whose rich lowlands were devoted to cotton-bearing. But whatever she did by day, she danced by night, with her wild gyration and gesture, as naturally as a moth flies; and when not in demand with the seigniory, was wont to perform in even keener force and fire at the quarters, to an admiring circle of her own kind, with ambitious imitators on the outskirts.