vexed at last by my painful efforts to understand how, precisely, the
dreadful thing had come about. But neither could I endure more. I fled
to my room. He had tried again to impress upon me that three eights
are but slightly inferior to the flush of clubs.

I faced my glass. My ordinary smooth, full face seemed to have
shrivelled. The marks of my anguish were upon me. Vainly had I locked
myself in. The gipsy's warning had borne its evil fruit. Sold, I'd
been; even as once the poor blackamoors were sold into American
bondage. I recalled one of their pathetic folk-songs in which the
wretches were wont to make light of their lamentable estate; a thing I
had often heard sung by a black with a banjo on the pier at Brighton;
not a genuine black, only dyed for the moment he was, but I had never
lost the plaintive quality of the verses:

"Away down South in Michigan,
Where I was so happy and so gay,
'Twas there I mowed the cotton and the cane----"

How poignantly the simple words came back to me! A slave, day after
day mowing his owner's cotton and cane, plucking the maize from the
savannahs, yet happy and gay! Should I be equal to this spirit? The
Honourable George had lost; so I, his pawn, must also submit like a
dead sport.

How little I then dreamed what adventures, what adversities, what
ignominies--yes, and what triumphs were to be mine in those back
blocks of North America! I saw but a bleak wilderness, a distressing
contact with people who never for a moment would do with us. I
shuddered. I despaired.