I spoke ironically, and he so understood me. The passions of Tom's great heart had been gradually wrought up by a review of the bloody scene he had himself witnessed, and which had made a strong impression on him, and he now sprung to his feet. '_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ be d--d!' he cried. 'Owen Glendower, what I've seen with my own eyes I know, don't I? I could tell you things that would make your hair stand straight out, if I was a mind to; but it's no use. 'As to slavery, as it exists in the Sugar and Cotton States, to-day, I have but one fit illustration for it. 'The religious writers of the Jews, and those who follow their ideas, have pictured to us the future condition of the sinner and finally impenitent as the most desperate and deplorable possible to be conceived--as they thought. They had never witnessed American slavery as practiced in the nineteenth century. If they, had, the material fire, the tormenting fiends, and the 'worm that never dies,' would have given place to the natural features of a Mississippi plantation, where the unrestrained passions of avarice, brutality, and lust make a Hell to which the _Gehenna_ of the Hebrews is but a mild sort of purgatory by comparison. 'About parting husband and wife, and parent and child, I will tell you one thing I myself saw in Kentucky; and in Kentucky you know, slavery exists in its mildest form, and the system approaches nearer to that patriarchal character which is most falsely claimed for it by its supporters, than in any of the more Southern States.' Just then Master Winters returned to the room, and on seeing him Tom's excitement apparently increased. He gesticulated violently, and delivered himself in short, emphatic sentences, interlarded, I am sorry to say, with rather too many of those objectionable expletives that an ex-slave-overseer may be supposed to be addicted to. Swearing is a vulgar practice, and one for which there is no sort of justification; and yet, I must confess, it is calculated to give a certain savage energy to one's language when he has not a very copious vocabulary of choicer epithets and synonyms at command. Of course I can not do justice to Tom's colloquial style in print, but he proceeded: 'I was, as I told you before, well acquainted with the slave-dealer, Meminger, at Lexington. We boarded together at M'Gowan's; and after my wife died I went about with him considerable. 'One day, in the winter before I left there to go to Mississippi, he and I were coming over from Danville. It was the coldest day I ever knew in Kentucky. Kentucky has a mild climate, and the winters are short and not very severe. Still the weather is very variable, and there will occasionally occur a day in January which is as cold as any where else, and which is felt all the more for being an exception.