"My head's bloody and I'm wet as a musk-rat, so I reckon I ain't afraid
of gittin' a little muddy," and with this the navigator stepped from the
scow in swamp nearly to his middle, and pulled himself up the slope by
main strength.
"I believe my soul this yer is a island," Jimmy remarked; "a island
surrounded with mud, that's wuss to git to than a water island."
The tall trees increased in size as he went on and entered a noble grove
of pines, through whose roar, like an organ accompanied by a human
voice, the singing was heard nearer and nearer, and, following the track
of previous feet, which had almost made a path, Phoebus came to a
space where an axe had laid the smaller bushes low around a large
loblolly pine that spread its branches like a roof only a few feet from
the ground; and there, fastened by a chain to the trunk, which allowed
her to go around and around the tree, and tread a nearly bare place in
the pine droppings or "shats," sat a black woman, singing in a long,
weary, throat-sore wail. Jimmy listened to a few lines:
"Deep-en de woun' dy han's have made
In dis weak, helpless soul,
Till mercy wid its mighty aid
De-scen to make me whole;
Yes, Lord!
De-scen to make me whole."
A little negro child, perhaps three years old, was lying asleep on the
ground at the woman's feet, in an old tattered gray blanket that might
have been discarded from a stable.
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