_Author._ “I’ve come up again, Peter, to go on with our story, and you can drive the peg while I drive the quill.”
_Peter._ “I had as many friends in that region as about any other man, I reckon, and if it hadn’t been for _one man_, I should have got along very well; but oh! how cruel master was. As I was a tellin’ on you, we went on buildin’ the frame house, and in diggin’ the cellar. I was a holdin’ the scraper and master was drivin’, and a root catched the scraper and jerked me over under the horse’s heels, and he took the but end of his whip, and mauled me over the head; and says I, ‘master, I hold the scraper as well as I can, and I wish you’d git somebody that’s stronger than me, to do it.’
“‘Come up here,’ says he, as he jumps up out of the cellar, with a halter in his hand, ‘and I’ll give you somebody that’s strong ’nough for you.’ Well, I got up, and he makes me strip, and hug an apple tree, and then ties me round it, and whips me with his ox-goad, while I was stark naked, _till he’d cut a good many gashes in my flesh, and the blood run down my heels in streams_; and then he unties me, and _kicks me down into the cellar_ to hold scraper agin. ☜
“At that, one of his hired men, who was a shovelin’, says, ‘Morehouse, you are too savage, to use your boy so, I swear!!’ Well, one word brought on another, till master orders him off of his premises. ‘Out of the cellar,’ says he, in a rage, for jist so soon as he reproved him, he biled like a pot, for you know if a body’s doin’ wrong, it makes ’em mad to be told on it. Well, out he got, and says he, as he jumps out on the bank, ‘now, Morehouse, if you are _a man_, come out here tu.’ But master darn’t do that, for he was a small man. ‘Then pay me!’ and master says, ‘I’ll be dam’d if I do.’ ‘Well,’ says the man, ‘I’ll put you in a way to pay me afore night.’ So it comes night, master rides up and pays him, and tries to _hire him agin_; but says he, ‘I wouldn’t work for sich a barbarous wretch, if you’d give me fifty dollars a day.’[5]