134 THE SLAVE PUGILIST. 



set-to, and for half an hour received such prodigious punishment as 

 would have destroyed almost any other man. His opponent began to 

 flag; Hannibal gradually became himself; and at length gathering 

 all his strength, inflicted a tremendous a mortal blow. " Blood," 

 said he, " human blood is on my hand, and there is an end of me. 

 I'm glad I have no children !" 



He now began to rave ; and I was obliged to rouse the neighbours : 

 we got him to bed, but he soon grew more delirious, and raged with such 

 horrible violence that it became necessary, in the course of the next 

 day, to bind the colossal madman down to his bed by halters. These, 

 at length, were deemed scarcely secure, and at nightfall, the doctor 

 directed me to forge strong iron fetters for him by the ensuing 

 morning. 



A working plan was sketched out for me ; and after supper I 

 began to forge my tears hissing on the iron almost at every stroke 

 of the hammer. About three o'clock in the morning, while punching 

 a rivet, something fell heavily from the beam above I looked up from 

 the anvil, and Mr. Straw stood before me ! There was a door from 

 the bed-room looking down into the shop j from the floor of this room 

 rafters passed across to the opposite wall ; those who were sitting up to 

 watch Hannibal had fallen asleep he had burst his bonds, opened 

 the door, traversed the middle beam, and dropped right in front of me. 

 His face was ghastly ; the rope round his wrists, had, in his struggles 

 to get free, bitten into his flesh ; his sleeves were sopped, and the crim- 

 son current trickled from his finger ends. I could have sunk into the 

 earth. 



" Go on, sirrah ! " said he, " let us finish ! You thought you were 

 making these irons for me but we'll weld them to fit your own 

 ankles. /'// rivet them into your bones red-hot." 



I shrieked with horror, and throwing down my hammer and 

 pincers, leaped behind the bellows. In an instant the people who had 

 been keeping watch descended, and a dreadful scene ensued. He called 

 the foremost, " Morgan, the skipper," and hurled the big hammer 

 at him, luckily without effect ; the rest he stigmatized as importers, 

 and loudly called on his owner, the free man of colour, to protect him. 

 Horse-shoes, tools, and every thing within his reach he converted 

 into weapons of defence he even tore the anvil from its stand, hurled 

 it forward a few paces, and then showered upon his friendly assailants 

 a deluge of fire, from the forge, which he completely emptied with 

 his naked hands. As they began to close upon him, he dashed furi- 

 ously forward, knocked them aside right and left, and reached the 

 main road. Through the wood by which he had first entered the 

 village, across the common, and far, far, into the depths of the forest 

 that skirted it we zealously followed him ; but without effect. He 

 distanced us and disappeared. The next day we were told that he 

 had been seen at dawn bounding at full speed over the naked brow of 

 a hill some miles off, and that was the last authentic intelligence we 

 ever heard of him. 



