Had I been imprisoned for a
certain term of years as an expiation for crimes, I think I could have
borne it better; but the injustice, the uncertainty of these proceedings
were more than I could sustain.
I fell asleep, I remember, on the night of my interview with
Gregory--_alias_ Englehart--to dream confusedly of Baron Trenck and his
iron collar, and the Princess Amelia and her unmitigated grief, and it
seemed to me that I was given to drink from a cup the poor prisoner had
carved (as memoirs tell us he carved and sold many such), filled with a
sort of bitter wine, by the man in the iron mask--so vividly did Fancy,
mixing her ingredients, typify the anguish of my waking moments, and
reproduce its anxieties, in dreams of night that could not be
controlled.
When I awoke in the morning it was to lie quietly, and listen to the
doleful voice of Sabra, for such had been Dinah's Congo name, uplifted
in what she called a "speritual" as she cleaned the brass mountings of
the grate and kindled its tardy fires. With very slight alteration and
adjustment, this picturesque and dramatic Obi hymn is given in this
place, just as I jotted it down in my diary, thus imprinting it on my
memory from her own dolphin-like lips and bellows-like lungs. Her
forefathers, she informed me with considerable pride, had been
snake-worshipers, and she certainly inherited their tendency to treat
the worst enemy of mankind with respectful adoration.
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