All his thoughts were reduced
to a continued wild succession of burning images,--the mild face of his
mother, so far away, as it smiled upon him when he ran about among the
cane groves of the west; the negroes, with their "young massa" on their
tongues, jabbering their affection; his father scowling upon him as
undutiful; another, not so far away, in whose eyes--beautiful to
him--love dwelt as his worshipper, looking all endearment, only the next
moment to cast upon him the withering glance of her contempt, if not
hatred; admirers, toadies, satellites, and sycophants, all there in
groups and in succession, beslabbering him with praises, then exploding
in peals of laughter. Nor was another awanting in these saturnalia--the
form and face of her whose one word of sentence had been to him as a
doom, and who fixed that doom in his soul by her red glance of reproof.
Seemingly very indifferent objects assumed in the new lights of his
spirit gigantic and affraying features,--the sea-gull, with its torn
back, bleeding and quivering, and those diamond eyes so bright even in
its looks of agony--an object low indeed in the scale of nature, but
here elevated by some overruling power into the very heart of man's
actions and destinies, as if to show out of what humble things the
lightnings of retribution may come.
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